Can you feel the winds of change? With the new look RPS comes a slight change to the Bargain Bucket. Now these words (the ones you are reading right now) are written by me (Lewie), whereas in the past one of the awesome foursome would be responsible for them. The deals will still be the same, but now I get to write more words for you. Identity crisis shenanigans aside, here are some good prices for electronic games of chance for your digital typewriters. Head to my site SavyGamer if you want more of this sort of thing.
Unreal Tournament: Game of the Year – £0.99/€1.99/$1.99
Unreal Deal Pack – £9.20/€16/$16
Unreal Tournament 3 – £5.60/€8/$8
Hands up who has bought Unreal Tournament 3 in a past sale, and still not played it? *Raises hand*. I think the reason I can’t quite bring myself to put any decent time into it is because it feels like it is basically a prettied up version of the previous games, except I don’t have any nostalgia for it. Plus I am too old now to play online shooty games. If nothing else though, UT3 is a good platform for all those sexy mods. For the minuscule price they are charging, I am going to buy UT99 simply because I have no idea where my disc is, I’ll see you on Facing Worlds, preferably in my sights. Unreal Tournament 3 is free to play this weekend, too. RPS coverage here.
Saints Row 2 – £5/$5
I picked this one out of the Direct2Drive offers specifically because it is one of those games that you can add the serial number directly to your Steam account, which I know you lot like. It’s an open world action game with it’s tongue firmly in it’s cheek. I’ve not installed it yet, and I think I am going to leave it til I get a new GFX card, because I hear it is quite system intensive. I have also heard varying reports about how bad the port is. Varying from “It’s not that bad” to “It is dreadful”. We’ll see I guess. Top tip: UK folk wanting to get this for £3 instead of £5, or indeed Euro folk want to get it at all, find a sympathetic yank to buy it for you, then get them to give you the serial number, which is region free as far as Steam is concerned. Although you will need it to be someone who doesn’t want to buy it for themselves, since D2D won’t let you buy a game twice on one account. Wot John thinks here.
Gratuitous Space Battles - £12.25/€13.56/$19.95
“Strategy + Spaceships + Explosions” says the Positech website, and that sounds like a delicious combination to me. This represents a saving of around 20% from buying it from the man himself, but this still gets you access to the rapidly moving beta. You can follow the development here, and more importantly, find out why Sisko is the man here. I’m holding off on this one for a while, Cliffski seems to be working very hard to improve the game based on how the beta is going, and if it pays off, the end result could be something very special. RPS coverage here.
Jedi Knight Collection – £14.99/€18.99/$19.99
I have an odd relationship with Lucasarts, I can’t decide if they are more like a good cop/bad cop routine, or an abusive spouse who never forgets my birthday. At least when they finally let us buy their excellent old games again, they charge us reasonable prices. These are the (mostly) first person games that largely follow the story of Kyle Katarn, Jedi and all round badass. These games were often slightly behind the curve technology wise, but you get to hurt a lot of storm troopers. It’s a mess of subtitles and colons, but this pack goes a long way to providing an interesting anthology of a series from a bye gone era. I dare you to try the demo of “Republic Heroes” on the 360 by the way, see if you can make it through the whole thing without vomiting.
Deal of the week
The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition – £3.49/€4.49/$4.99
Please don’t hurt me. I go this when it first came out (the Special Edition that is), and, well, I didn’t really like it. I can accept the dated puzzle mechanics, and the back tracking, it is after all a point and click adventure, I knew what I was getting myself into. But the real let down for me was that I just didn’t find it particularly funny. Maybe I’m broken, or maybe I wasn’t in the right frame of mind playing it, who knows. I will say this, it is a lovingly crafted “Special Edition”, and mapping the “switch to original graphics/sound” to a keyboard button was a stroke of genius. The iPhone version is on special offer too, and they are giving away episode 1 of the new telltale “Tales of Monkey Island” series for free for today (Saturday) only, direct your browser hither for details. RPS coverage here.
Also of note:
D2D 5 currency sale – UK/USA, notable games are Bioshock, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl, and (USA only) The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena.
GOG Strategy Games promo
New LucasArts Adventure Pack. Games that were available previously, but are now bundled at a discount. This is a permanent offer it would seem.
Tropico 3 Preorder – 10% off
Scavenger – 50% off
Droplitz – 50% off
Aztaka – 50% off (tried to play the demo of this, but it corrupted both times I downloaded it, grumble grumble).
Also Also of note, I have compiled a list of all the games that could feasibly be in the D2D sale over the next three weeks. If you have any plans to buy anything listed here, maybe hold off to see if it is available for just five shiny coins in the near future.
If that lot’s not enough for you, do check out SavyGamer.co.uk for constantly-updated bargains across all formats.
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I’m one of teh many that cannot get Saints Row 2 to run, and having dropped a note to Direct2Drive asking for a refund, i’ve basically been told to sling my hook and they will not give a refund against this game. They only advise to contact THQ, who have already posted that there will not be any future patches. So basically, i’ve wasted £5 – don’t make the same mistake and avoid the ripoff company known as Direct2Drive at all costs.
I was tempted, but understood. When they wont refund i’ll need to be absolutely sure the game is going to work. A demo for example.
On the bright side you might get the game working one day, but maybe not before you can buy a retail copy for a similar price anyway.
Dear lord do NOT buy Saints Row 2 for PC. I have not heard ANYONE able to run it at a good framerate, they’ve done something very badly in there.
Regional restrictions? Screw that. Screw that with a palm tree.
US/UK only bargains confuse and anger me
First point: classic adventure mechanics are NEVER dated. That’s a phallacy. Adventure games are for solving puzzles talking, clicking, and racing games are for going fast, platforming games are for exploring and jumping, period.
Second point: to understand Monkey island you need to have a wide pop culture background: it references hundreds of sources which, somehow, were remembered at the time the game was released but now they aren’t. I mean, no kid remembers Errol Flynn right now, and no kid has ever though of “Treasure Island” as a fun book. Monkey Island takes something from there, other from films, other from metalanguage (the sword fight, the adventure story itself) and it’s quite more an erudite game than it is said to be. You cannot play it expecting a ZAZ kind of humor. And if you don’t get it, then either you don’t like the genre at all (and I mean the classic thematic genre) or you haven’t reached the “level” yet. I mean, the same thing when you don’t like westerns and then, one day, you begin to understand them.
Works fine for me, although I get framerate problems with GTA IV if I set the vision to anything more than “cataracts”.
Maybe it’s some kind of conspiracy to force you to only play one game or the other …
I picked up Saints Row 2 on this sale, it was a fun rental for the 360 and 5$ is less than another rental would cost so .. The port isn’t too bad, sure the menus take some getting used to but I’m kind of used to that from too much Dwarf Fortress.
It’s a definite system hog. I had to choose to run with either full Dynamic Shadows (makes characters look ‘next gen’), or full Local Lighting (makes interiors not look like they’re from 2003), in order to get a good framerate outside. My videocard is a little old (8800 GTS) and my CPU doesn’t have good single core speed (quad-core). Also turned off motion blur (twice) and depth of field, because I’m pretty sure they’d kill my eyes / equilibrium during extended play.
I suspect the thing just fails in Vista or Windows 7, as is pretty typical. I’m still running XP for that very reason. Or maybe it hates ATI cards. Maybe it hates newer / older cards. Who knows. I’m just the lucky few who can run it I suppose.
@Stromko: I’m running SR2 on Vista, with an ATI video card (Radeon 3870) and it runs acceptably for me. Not great, but good enough to be worth 5 bucks. I shut off ambient screen space occolusion, motion blur (why do so many games use this, and why is Left 4 Dead the only one that’s used it well?), and depth of field, and ratcheted my AA and AF down to x4 and x8, respectively. That’s on a 2.4 gig quad core Athlon.
Yea, no matter how hard I tried to find good Value in the ridiculously cheap UT3 sales, I couldn’t get myself to actually buy it. Reading the part about having bought it in the sale months(?) ago and not yet played it, I felt reassurance. Sure $8 (or $11 for us European suckers who always pay more for the same bits and bytes) is ass-cheap, but if I’d never even play the thing, what do I pay for?
I have to disagree with the “prettied up UT” statement, though. For me it’s and “uglified UT” with 100 times the polygon count. Never seen a kitschier game in my life.
Ahem, let me bang the drum for Aztaka. That’s a great little indie game if there ever was one.
Hmm, is S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl messed up on d2d for anyone else? I can see the link and click on it, but it just takes me back to the main page :,(
I’m having the exact same problem, Earl! And after all that trouble I went to setting up a D2D account… =(