Rock, Paper, Shotgun

By Lewie Procter on May 12th, 2012 at 10:00 am.

Let’s play some computer games. Better than that, lets play some cheap computer games. Computer games that cost less than you might expect them to are my favourite type of computer games. In fact, finding a games that cost not very much money is more fun than actually playing the games for me. That’s because I’m an fiscally obsessed weirdo though, so if you want you can leave the deal hunting to me, and you take responsibility of the purchasing and the playing of the games. Observe my ongoing decent into price-watching insanity over at SavyGamer.co.uk, and read on for your weekly download round-up.

Thief: Deadly Shadows – £2.49/€3.89/$3.89
Or as it retroactively must be called, Thi3f: Deadly Shadows. I’ve stolen a little extract of that Kieron chap’s making of feature:

“On some very basic level, we were trying to do the right thing with game design,” Jordan notes, “We were pushing the right boundaries. The notion of simulation and free-play spaces, with prone to emergent, systemic design… that absolutely is the wave of the future. People are going to start demanding that the world behave as if it’s a collection of inter-reflection behaviours, rather than “Hey – look! These are our deterministic rules for how things works. If you don’t use the chainsaw on the desk, which we’ve told to respond to the desk, it’ll never, ever function”. But at this stage, we were sort of on the frontier and kind of stumbled. But we paved the way.”

NecroVision & NecroVisioN: Lost Company – £4.99/€4.99/$5.99
These are as trashy as you’d expect any FPS that recreates a historical conflict, except with zombies, to be. That doesn’t stop them from being jolly good fun, though. The shooting is pretty great, you get a solid kick attack that sends baddies flying, and there’s a scoring system that throws bonus points at you for killing the baddies in particularly brutal ways. It’s actually surprisingly light-hearted and arcadey considering the subject matter. A bit of a b-game.

Tropico 3 – £2.10/€2.62/$3.39
This is on sale all over the place, but the cheapest of all the places is Amazon. It’s a trend that’s always been around, but I’ve noticed it more and more recently, for a game to go on sale at one place only for it to then go on sale at lots of other places at the same time. Hmm. Were I an all powerful dictator, I’d make sure all games were on sale all the time. What would you do? You can probably find out by playing Tropico 3. Here’s wot Jim thought of it. If you’re outside of North America, you’ll need to add a US billing address to your account to be able to buy this.

Company of Heroes
These are all on sale at Steam, but depending on what region you’re in, it’s possibly cheaper to buy them all individually, rather than the Complete Pack. Good job THQ. That Kieron bloke reviewed the first one over at Eurogamer, and then Alec did the same for the second one too. Stick with RPS for news of the recently announced Company of Heroes sequel, coming probably next week or something.

Deal of the week
Batman: Arkham City – £7.98/€11.18/$11.98
This has been cheap a bunch of times recently, but not this cheap. It’s a bit of a belter of a sequel, even if I preferred certain elements of the first game, I’m very happy to live in a universe where we have both. Adam said these words about it when he told us wot he thought:

The most exciting thing about Arkham City, beyond the sheer joy of actually playing, is that it’s not just more of the same. It’s more of everything else as well, which can be detrimental. But despite perhaps sounding overly critical of some aspects, I wouldn’t hesitate to say it’s one of the best games I’ve played this year. There is an enormous amount to do and now that I’m finished, I feel free to do it, no longer constrained by the fate of Gotham I can solve all those side stories. And even though I have a redwood-like backlog, I think that’s exactly what I’m going to do.

Also of note:
Need For Speed Shift 2: Unleashed – £4.99. UK only (I think). Optionall registers on Origin.
Rollercoaster Tycoon 3: Platinum – £3.09/€3.86/$4.99
Dungeon Siege III – £4.49/€5.59/$5.59. Registers on Steam, and you can get it with the DLC for a little bit more.
Mutant Storm: Reloaded – £1.99

For more of the cheap games, click on this link to go to my website full of cheap games.