By RPS on August 13th, 2009 at 11:40 am.
The handsome men (man, really) of Zombie Cow have decided that fiftyish Rock, Paper, Shotgun readers should have the chance to purchase a copy of the most splendid Time Gentlemen, Please for half price. It’s not a competition, just a first come, first served sort of deal (our lovely subscribers got first dibs on the first round of discount copies yesterday), so if you’re after one of the best, funniest, and smartest adventure games in many years for the ludicrous price of £1.50 (that’s around $2.50), click here. Once fifty are gone, they’ll revert back to the still incredibly reasonable regular £3 ($5ish) price, and Zombie Cow’s Dan Marshall will have some money to spend on sweets and developing more games for us to play. Or maybe he’ll even extend the deal if demand’s high enough.
13/08/2009 at 11:50 DM says:
£1.50? I would purchase half a lung for that kind of money and be confident I’d gotten my money’s worth!
Bought.
13/08/2009 at 11:52 groovychainsaw says:
Also bought – thanks a lot! Looking forward to this…
13/08/2009 at 11:53 JuJuCam says:
Taken. I was gonna get in anyway soon as I got round to finishing Ben There, Dan That, but why wait at half the price?
13/08/2009 at 11:56 DM says:
Hm. Slightly embarrassing. Can’t actually work out how to download it. Have the encroaching terror that I’m accomplishing one of those ‘CD-drawer? Don’t have one of those, but the coffee cup holder snapped off’ scale idiot-moves.
13/08/2009 at 12:04 RLacey says:
I will buy (almost) anything for £1.50. Or even £1.72 post-VAT.
13/08/2009 at 12:07 Colthor says:
@DM:
Check all your email accounts – when I bought it the “download from here” email wound up in the wrong one because the form remembered it despite changing it to match my PayPal address.
This is cheap at twice the price, and a jolly good game.
13/08/2009 at 12:13 Howard says:
Umm…thanks for the offer and all but your online purchase system screwed up and I have no game.
I paid through PayPal and sat and waited on the page as instructed. After about 4 minutes though it just went blank. I have received no email regarding my download but you *have* received my money (PP confirmed)
Suggestions?
13/08/2009 at 12:15 Mike says:
This is seriously worth it. Please just go and get it now and don’t buy lunch.
13/08/2009 at 12:16 Nahkatakkimies says:
Bought.
13/08/2009 at 12:17 Alec Meer says:
Howard: suggestions would include dropping a line to the folks who make and sell the game, as we’re not involved in any way bar linking to it: http://www.zombie-cow.com/?page_id=10. Let us know if you don’t hear back from them
13/08/2009 at 12:20 Lewis says:
Howard: exact same thing for me. Will have to email about it.
13/08/2009 at 12:21 Mahti says:
Howard & others who didn’t receive the email:
Had your “problem” too, but the mail arrived after ~30 mins or so, so it’s not instantaneous.
13/08/2009 at 12:21 Adam Szedlak says:
Bought, had to wait a while for Plimus to crunch the numbers, and finally got download link. Thank you Zombie Cow and RPS.
13/08/2009 at 12:23 milko says:
I got same problem as Howard. I’m sure Dan will sort us out just fine, but maybe people should be wary of the Paypal option there for now.
13/08/2009 at 12:23 Iain says:
Same for me – I paid by paypal and it took a little while for the email to come through, but it did appear eventually.
13/08/2009 at 12:24 Acosta says:
Taken, and received the mail (payed with CC). But I’m a day one subscriber of RPS and didn’t receive any discount copy announcement, did you send them through email? Where is the love? *cries*
13/08/2009 at 12:24 zipdrive says:
Done, waiting for it to be processed.
I’m actually feeling a little silly using a credit card to pay 2.5$ – the foreign currency transaction commission is probably higher than that.
13/08/2009 at 12:25 Tiktaalik says:
Hmm – I paid by credit card and after a couple of minutes wait I was just sent to the developers home page with no download link in sight. I’ve just got a receipt in my email though, so hopefully a download link will be forthcoming at some point!
13/08/2009 at 12:28 Lewis says:
Yep, mine just came through.
13/08/2009 at 12:28 Alec Meer says:
Acosta – yeah, it went out by email. Drop us an email from the email you set up the paypal sub with and we’ll see what’s what. Sorry about the muckup.
13/08/2009 at 12:30 milko says:
oh yeah, so the email did make it through. Just the blank page instead of an ‘email coming soon!’ which is the problem then I guess.
13/08/2009 at 12:32 MD says:
Tiktaalik, that’s the same as happened to me (though I paid via PayPal). I left the room for a while and the link was in my inbox when I returned. Took a bit over 5 minutes.
13/08/2009 at 12:33 Acosta says:
Haha, ok, done, but don’t worry about it Alec, if I’m subscriber is to give something in exchange for your excellent work here, not for the Club Discounts.
13/08/2009 at 12:35 DM says:
Indeed, same problem as everyone else. Even pestered the poor chap about it. To think, apparently making miniscule budget hyper-indie(™) adventure games and then selling them through your online site at a tiny price with almost no advertising other than word of mouth, actually isn’t all fun and games.
…Well, technically, I suppose it is all fun and games. In the sense of it actually being fun and games though, the fun and games business isn’t very fun. Or game.
13/08/2009 at 12:37 Subject 706 says:
Bought this, loved this. Much more fun than I though it would be. “Ve vill shoot you in ze cock, old man” had me almost doubled over with laughter.
13/08/2009 at 12:41 Fede says:
Thanks a lot.
I was just waiting to finish other games before getting it, but this was an offer I couldn’t refuse :)
13/08/2009 at 12:46 Senethro says:
Claimed! I was waiting until I had more free time, but this promotion made me buy it NOW. Cheers, ZC and RPS.
13/08/2009 at 12:47 Rosti says:
Done (hopefully!). Zombie Cow can have the other half if it’s ace, too…
13/08/2009 at 12:48 FunkyB says:
Nooo, it was there but then I switched to Paypal and it disappeared. Looks like they’re all gone. Now I have to pay the totally unreasonable price of £3 ;)
13/08/2009 at 12:51 Horza says:
Bought this a while ago (immediately after seeing a screenshot with a nazi dinosaur in it). Excellent value for money at full price so not buying this with discount would just be stupid.
13/08/2009 at 12:52 Martin says:
damn! its gone!
13/08/2009 at 12:57 Popabawa says:
Boo! Stupid IE (I’m at work, I have no option) crashed while I was paying and it looks like the offer has now gone.
Full price it is then.
13/08/2009 at 13:07 El_MUERkO says:
Buy it for it is good, even if some of the puzzles are a total ball ache and the ending is great :D
In the threequel Ben definitely needs to kill more people, his murderous blood lust was lacking in this game.
13/08/2009 at 13:15 sfury says:
…but I’d feel awful paying only half of the even now ridiculously low priced indie game.
Oh wait, it’s full-priced now so I guess 50 RPSers already bought it? That was fast.
Seriously though – the only thing that has stopped me so far from checking it out is my lack of time and no amount of (resonable) pricing will keep me from eventually doing that.
Well-timed promo though – if they do it with other blogs they can generate some good post-release publicity and purchases. :)
13/08/2009 at 13:42 Adam says:
Bought it using your link. Thanks!
Should I start this straight away or finish ben there dan that? I just got to the “british” bit if you know what I mean.
13/08/2009 at 13:48 Professor says:
Thanks RPS, bought it while the deal was up.
13/08/2009 at 14:12 Andy says:
This game is just brillo, bought it a few weeks ago it is so worth playing.
They need all the support they can get so we’ll eventually get to play another fantastic adventure like this one!
13/08/2009 at 14:16 abhishek says:
Aww damn it’s over. Curses on the RSS feed which takes so long to show up in the reader :(
13/08/2009 at 14:20 mbp says:
I still remember reading Dan’s Marshall’s series articles in PCZone where he volunteered to write a PC game from scratch as a kind of dare. I thought the whole thing was a joke and that Dan who could barely code “Hello World” hadn’t a hope of producing anything playable. Now here we are several years later and Dan is creating well regarded games and making a business out of it. Fair dues I say. Well done sir.
13/08/2009 at 14:28 airtekh says:
I already bought and played this two weeks ago when it was full price and it was worth every penny.
Possibly more ;)
13/08/2009 at 14:29 Howard says:
Well I gave it an hour or 2 to see if the email turned up but no dice.
Have emailed the chap to see if he can fix it for me.
13/08/2009 at 14:47 Howard says:
All sorted. Dan was all over this like a cheap suit. Will be installing as soon as this bloody beta for Section 8 FINALLY finishes titting about…
Thanks again to Dan for the offer and his speedy reply!
13/08/2009 at 15:34 Alex says:
Totally worth full price – I loved it!
13/08/2009 at 15:54 wiper says:
*is a little bit miffed that, despite being a subscriber, he got no dibs at all*
13/08/2009 at 16:01 wiper says:
^on further inspection, it appears that my payment for this month, which should have gone through on the 11th, ‘failed’ for no apparent reason, and is being automatically reattempted on the 14th. Figures that my subscription would bizarrely lapse the one time something awesome was offered :(
13/08/2009 at 16:06 Ginger Yellow says:
Bah. Bought this a little over a week ago for the exorbitant £3 full price. Still, I’m perfectly happy to give the developers more money. Awesome, awesome game.
It really doesn’t like Alt-Tabbing in Windows 7, though.
13/08/2009 at 16:52 skizelo says:
I seem to have missed out on this one. Shame. I was just saying to the missus the other night that I wanted to jump on, but £3 seemed a bit steep.
Science has proven that the only way Zombie Cow could make their game any cheaper would be to write a virus which installs it on thousands of unsuspecting computers. I “bought” Ben There, Done That because the asking price for TGP honestly seemed like an insult.
13/08/2009 at 17:04 JonFitt says:
I missed the deal, but bought it anyway since I’d been meaning to do so but hadn’t got around to it.
Hurrah for successful indie marketing!
13/08/2009 at 17:11 Alec Meer says:
Wiper – drop us an email from your Paypal email address and we’ll get you added to subscriber list. There’s a few gaps in it due a tech foul-up a while back – sorry about that.
13/08/2009 at 17:19 thezombiecow says:
Wiper – also, drop me an email and I’ll sort you out with a half-price copy, somehow. :)
13/08/2009 at 17:20 thezombiecow says:
ALSO: thanks everyone for your support, it’s awesome. Sorry those 50 ran out so quickly, I’ll look into doing it again when I work out whether or not it’s likely to bankrupt me.
13/08/2009 at 17:56 Jad says:
Is there any chance that TGP will come to Steam or other DD services? Not that its a necessity , but I get the increasing feeling that the modern age requires me to have way too many accounts/passwords/emails with important URLs. I’m even considering springing for the CD for an extra $10 if the case is no. I assume the CD doesn’t also come with Ben There, Dan That, right?
13/08/2009 at 17:58 Vinraith says:
@Jad
Since the download is DRM-free (right?) you could just burn it to disc yourself for a buck. That’s how I usually handle DRM-free indies, I never plan on redownloading, I just burn off a disc and pretend I bought them retail.
13/08/2009 at 18:04 thezombiecow says:
Yeah, I’d ignore the CD version, it’s nothing exciting. I keep turning it off, but every time I re-upload the .exe it gets switched on again. There’s no DRM waffle, so it’s probably smartest to just burn it to a dikette yourself.
13/08/2009 at 18:13 Jad says:
@Vinraith
You’re right, I should do that. I was kind of imagining the CD to come in a nice box/jewel case or something; but now that I think of it, it probably would be just a CD in a paper sleeve.
Its more a case of forgetting I even have the game than anything — I know I have all these retail games because they’re sitting on my shelf, and I know I have these Steam games because they’re in my Steam games list, but I’m afraid that other games just can just slip through the cracks. Especially when I really have no time to play games right now, and won’t be able to get to this one for a month or so.
Anyway, this isn’t a real complaint for Zombie Cow, as I realize these problems are all my own doing. Maybe I’ll download Ben There, Dan That tonight and put the shortcut on my desktop so I’ll remember it later when I have the time to play. Put some exclamation points on the shortcut name. Yeah.
13/08/2009 at 18:16 Markoff Chaney says:
I missed the half off members only sale too, but I feel I need to buy this girl at full price and gladly will, as I hope you fine gentlemen can continue making games I enjoy immensely. Even at its current full price it is a bargain, if BTDT is anything to go by. I’m ashamed to admit I only recently (yesterday) finished BTDT but I had been going through an Adventure Gamoritorium there for a bit. Your singular game reawakened my desire to puzzle and explore with a VENGEANCE! Thank You, Good Sirs.
13/08/2009 at 18:17 Vinraith says:
@Jad
Yeah, it’s getting harder and harder to organize things because of all the different places from which games come these days. I have games on a multitude of download services, retail boxes, and downloaded burned discs, and like you I’ve accumulating a pile of stuff I haven’t touched and need to remember I have. Personally, I just keep a list of “stuff I need to play” so I don’t forget, but believe me I understand the problem.
13/08/2009 at 19:00 Bioptic says:
I personally dump shortcuts to everything non-Steam in a ‘Games’ folder – when something gets uninstalled, the shortcut blanks out, so I get handy reminder of what I own and I what I’ve actually got installed. You can just add non-Steam games to your games list, of course!
Oh, and I’m one of the lucky few who took an early lunch break and stumbled upon this – so many thanks to Ben and Dan, and I’ll be sure to spread the word!
13/08/2009 at 19:57 plowshares says:
bought game for full price and kicked back the suggested retail donation for ben there dan that
13/08/2009 at 20:04 Kadayi says:
Bought and I also thought it was about time I subscribed as well. Someone has to keep Kieron in penny chews after all.
13/08/2009 at 20:10 Ginger Yellow says:
You guys do realise that there’s this thing in Windows called a Start menu, don’t you? All the games you’ve installed are there. In a folder called “Games”, if you’re organised.
13/08/2009 at 20:13 Dracko says:
Speaking of adventure games:
http://jordanmechner.com/blog/2009/08/unfinished-last-express-prequel/
http://jordanmechner.com/blog/2009/03/the-last-express-remixed/
13/08/2009 at 21:03 Cameron says:
I just wanted to post this singular comment in order to show my acquiescence to my all benevolent Hivemind Overlords. Just this once… ;)
13/08/2009 at 21:06 Markoff Chaney says:
I still game on XP primarily and I have 8 separate folders (Action, Adventure, FPS, MMO-Online, Platform, Puzzle, RPG and Strategy) nestled in my Games folder which is nestled in my Start Menu. I use that classification system for Vista as well, though, because sometimes I think I have too many games. Other times I know I have too many installed when I sit there for 20 minutes trying to decide what to play… There’s actually 9 subdivisions if I count my “Controller” folder I use when I game on my HDTV upstairs.
Nice share from Mr. Mechner’s page as well. Thank you.
13/08/2009 at 21:22 Vinraith says:
@Ginger Yellow
I tend to only install things when I intend to use them.
13/08/2009 at 21:53 Gap Gen says:
I will buy anything that is less than the price of a pint.
13/08/2009 at 23:34 Dorian Cornelius Jasper says:
Damn! I just checked and it’s back to $5.
…
I guess I’ll buy it anyway.
13/08/2009 at 23:58 Michael says:
I’ve gotten more fun and playtime out of this game than DoW II ($50 USD) and Empire: Total War ($80 AUD).
But I’m a bit weird and I’m shit at strategery.
14/08/2009 at 14:08 Cooper says:
I bought this the other day as a game for my netbook in prep for the month-and-a-half I have here in Kiev. Thing is, I added the same amount again as a donation for Ben There, Dan That – the way I saw it, I was happy to pay six bob for these. That half price is just ludicrous (and more fool me for not yet changing my PayPal email to one that I ever bother to check…)
But, hooray for sensible (well, really mad pricing in this case – but the right end of the mad pricing spectrum) priced indie games. I’m getting a bit annoyed by the occasional announcement of a mildly intersting but short indie game being flogged online for over 15 quid. I don’t even pay that much for major games, I wait until retail goes down. Thing is, online game prices don’t ever seem to drop with age
14/08/2009 at 14:13 LewieP says:
Another one of their games, Gibbage, is on special offer now too:
http://bit.ly/8QknN
Demo here: http://www.zombie-cow.com/?page_id=15
14/08/2009 at 14:15 LewieP says:
^in fact, I saw that on their twitter, maybe they’ll announce more special offers there too
http://twitter.com/thezombiecow
20/08/2009 at 12:52 Alex says:
Finally bought this, its genius. Shot in the cock indeed. (And, in case the good gentlemen
But; good people of RPS, I am really effin’ stuck with the boot disk. I know all the data (I think) but it just tells me I did it wrong. Can’t find a walkthrough that gives what exactly I have to type in and I NEED MORE. Are there any trips? Do I have to type, e.g., “42″ rather than “v4.2″ as the version #, cus it gives vX.X as the format?
Or am I just doing something stupidly wrong? (This, I guess, would be hard for people to gauge.)
21/08/2009 at 08:51 peakish says:
v4.2 IIRC.
A walkthrough is here: http://jayisgames.com/archives/2009/06/time_gentlemen_please.php