Eidos Anthology Has A Lot Of Good Games, Is Pricey

A rather strange addition to Steam's Early Access list popped up over the weekend - the Eidos Anthology. Eidos, which sort of exists inside the maw of Square Enix, is no slouch when it comes to noteworthy games, and Eidos Montreal recently picked up a Golden Joystick for Best Hair or similar. An anthology of their games is quite the thing.

In a collection of quite enormous proportions, Square are selling 34 games (including all the Tomb Raiders, all the Thiefs, all the Deus Exes) and about forty-nine billion DLC packs at just over half the price of buying them individually. That price, however, is £160. Cor.

We've checked with Square, and the Early Access appearance is a mistake, due to Nosgoth's inclusion in the deal. It obviously tripped some sort of switch at Valve, and rather than this being some sort of exciting ongoing deal, it has instead just been put on the wrong shelf. It seems our asking about this has brought it to Square's attention, and they're going to try to get it moved.

Which is a shame, a bit, I think. RPS-speculo-chat wondered if perhaps this was going to be some sort of super-exciting deal where spending such an enormous sum at once on Eidos games might secure you copies of forthcoming titles from the studios. Perhaps not realistic, but we imagined it for a moment, and that was fun.

What you in fact get is an awful lot of games, and some of them are awfully good. I'll list them all here, in a useful way, because the mad splurge on the Steam page is a little overwhelming. So, in there you have:

The Deus Exes

Deus Ex: GOTY
Deus Ex: Invisible War
Deus Ex: Human Revolution - Director's Cut
Deus Ex: The Fall

The Hitmans

Hitman: Codename 47
Hitman 2: Silent Assassin
Hitman: Contracts
Hitman: Blood Money
Hitman: Absolution

The Tomb Raiders

Tomb Raider I
Tomb Raider II
Tomb Raider III
Tomb Raider IV: The Last Revelation
Tomb Raider V: Chronicles
Tomb Raider VI: The Angel Of Darkness
Tomb Raider: Legend
Tomb Raider: Anniversary
Tomb Raider: Underworld
Lara Croft And The Guardian Of Light
Tomb Raider

The Thiefs

Thief: Gold (The Dark Project)
Thief II: The Metal Age
Thief: Deadly Shadows
Thief

And then alongside all of those there's also:

Battlestations Pacific
Battlestations: Midway
Blood Omen 2: Legacy Of Kain
Legacy Of Kain: Defiance
Legacy Of Kain: Soul Reaver
Legacy Of Kain: Soul Reaver 2
Just Cause
Just Cause 2
Kane & Lynch: Dead Men
Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days
Nosgoth/Veteran Pack

And indeed every piece of DLC that's been released for all of them.

It's an awful lot of stuff. It, by my count, contains about twenty genuinely fantastic games - some of them in the top 10 ever. And yet, despite this, gosh, £160 looks like an awful lot of money. There's no question you're getting a good bargain here, should you somehow have stumbled through your life without playing the Deus Exes, Thiefs and Tomb Raiders, because you were maybe kidnapped by space monsters, or perhaps were only just born. I do wonder, though, if it might suddenly be the most popular thing on Steam, making Square's profit worries a thing of the long past, if they'd made it something exceptional like £70.