Steam Has Ridiculous Thanksgiving Weekend/Black Friday Sale
The headline says it all. Steam usually has some pretty good deals, but they might have outdone themselves with this one. The sale runs through Sunday, so pick up these games while you can. Highlights include, for today alone:
- Fallout: New Vegas - $5
- Monkey Island Special Edition Bundle - $5
- L.A. Noire - $25
- Total War Mega Pack - $12.50
Other sales going on for the weekend include:
- Portal 1 and 2 - $17.50
- Orcs Must Die! - $7.50
- Mass Effect 2 - $10
- Dungeon Defenders - $7.50
- Sam and Max Complete Pack - $33.50
If you want some PC games, now's a great time.
Fun With Science: Get Portal 2′s Soundtrack For Free, “Peer Review” DLC Coming Out Wednesday
Hey, check it out. Free music. Specifically, a free soundtrack to Portal 2. More specifically, Valve is offering the complete 64-track soundtrack to Portal 2, "Music to Test By," for free on the Portal web site.
The Portal 2 soundtrack, like every other aspect of the game, was excellent, with some haunting and tense music that reflected both the dark humor and the surreal, clever action of the game's various Aperture Science settings. It had some great electronic and ambient tracks, and listening to any of them will take you back to the shifting walls and grimy pipes of the testing facility. For the record, the two catchy sounds in the Portal 2 commercials are "Science is Fun" and "Halls of Science," both of which are in the soundtrack.
Valve also released a handful of ringtones from the soundtrack and the game's sound effects. There aren't any quotes from GLADoS, Cave Johnson, or Wheatley, but there are portal and button sounds, plus short clips of the more notable tracks in the soundtrack cut for ringtone use. If that's not enough, Valve is also releasing the "Peer Review" DLC for Portal 2 Wednesday. It's free and mostly co-op but with some single-player support. Keep an eye out for it on Steam.
Portal 2 Now Just $30-35
You haven't played Portal 2? You need to play Portal 2. The full review of the single player campaign comes later this week, but here's a preview: without the co-op mode, purely based on the gameplay, writing, voice acting, and graphics of the single player mode, Portal 2 is excellent. Stephen Merchant and JK Simmons steal the show as Wheatley and Cave Johnson, the game is easily twice as long as the first Portal, and it's even funnier and darker. For that experience alone, the game is worth the $50 it goes for on PC and $60 it goes for on PS3 and Xbox 360.
Well, went for $50/60. Amazon just dropped the price like a rock
Humble Bundle Sells Trine, Shadowgrounds for As Much As You Want
The Humble Bundle is a brilliant idea. Set your own price for a pack of indie games and decide how much of that money goes to the developers and how much goes to organizations like Child's Play and the EFF. You can be a really cheap dickbag and pay a buck, or a reasonable gamer and pay $10, or be an exceedingly generous chap and plunk a ton of money toward the cause of indie developers, electronic freedom, and childrens' hospitals.
The newest Humble Bundle is out, the Humble Frozenbyte Bundle. For the next 12 days, you can pick up every Frozenbyte game, including an upcoming title and an unreleased prototype title, for as much or as little as you want. That's Trine, Shadowgrounds, Shadowgrounds: Survivor, the upcoming Splot, and the unfinished Jack Claw. The games are completely DRM-free, can be played on Windows, Mac, and Linux systems (depending on the game), and can even be transferred to your Steam account for easy downloading and updating.
Over 100,000 gamers have bought the Bundle, paying an average of $5.11 for it. On the top of the list? Minecraft's Notch, who plunked down $2,000 for it, allocated to the developers and charities of the Bundle. Check it out. You can't go wrong with the price.
6 Great Classic Games You Can Play For Free (And Legitimately!)
Let's be honest, while we can get plenty of classic games online through services like Steam or GOG.com, there are tons of old titles that aren't exactly available through traditional means. Emulation is generally illegal, and abandonware is a pretty thick grey area, so if your favorite old game isn't sold through an online store or cheap through eBay or Amazon.com, you're out of luck. Fortunately, several game publishers have put their best old games out for free, or released them for redistribution with permission.
Here are 6 great classic games you can get, legally and legitimately, for free. You might need DOSBox to get some of these titles running, but at least now you can run them without feeling paranoid.
GOG Goes Really Old School With Zork Anthology For $6
Pull up a chair, children, and let me tell you a story. Long ago, we had these things called text-based adventure games. They were adventure games that-
Okay, okay. Some time ago, we had adventure games. They were point-and-click PC games that-
What are PC games? That's it, get out of my den! I'm taking you little bastards out of my will!
Anyway, GOG.com just added the Zork Anthology to its library. The site calls this release the "most oldschool one in GOG history," and I'm not sure I can argue. The earliest game, Zork, came out in 1980. The latest game, Zork Zero, came out in 1988. It was also the first one to have graphics. It also comes with 1983's Planetfall, a sci-fi text adventure made by Steve Meretzky, who also made Zork Zero and Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
Sadly, the later, graphical Zork games (Return to Zork through Zork Grand Inquisitor) are not part of the $6 bundle. Still, a buck each for six portals into the adventure games of the early 80s is a pretty great deal.
Tyrian 2000 and Beneath a Steel Sky Free on GOG
You can enjoy some free old-school gaming in the new year thanks to some surprisingly free downloads on GOG.com. Entertaining and underrated shmup Tyrian 2000 is now available for free on GOG, along with seminal cyberpunk adventure game Beneath a Steel Sky. They're joined by slightly obscure adventure game Lure of the Temptress and extremely obscure Polish adventure game Teenagent (featuring "Jokes that will never get old" and "Nice graphics and witty dialogs"). The adventure games have been in GOG's library for some time, but Tyrian 2000 only just became free.
Like all other GOG downloads, these games are Windows-compatible and come with free supplemental materials like instruction manuals, soundtracks, and even wallpapers. GOG also has 250 of its games on sale for 30-50% off, including Psychonauts, Beyond Good and Evil, and Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. Not bad things to do with your spare change.
Seriously, Get The Humble Indie Bundle
You have three days left to get the best deal of the holiday season: some of the best indie PC games available for however much you want to pay, with ample opportunity to give to charity while doing so. The Humble Indie Bundle #2 is on sale, letting you pay any amount of money for 5 great indie games. If you pay more than the average donation (currently $7.47), you'll get the Humble Indie Bundle #1 to boot! That's 10 total games for less than $10, if that's how much you want to give.
There's good reason for paying $20, or $30, or even $50 for the bundle, though. The Humble Indie Bundle was put together to raise money for charities like Child's Play and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and you can choose exactly how much of your cash goes to the charities and how much goes to the developers. If you've ever wanted to put money toward some good causes while directly supporting independent game developers, this is your best bet.
Highlights of the bundle include old-school adventure with gorgeous art Machinarium, critically acclaimed (and admittedly pretentious and confusing) puzzle-platformer Braid, critically acclaimed physics-based puzzle game World of Goo, aquatic Metroidvania-style platformer Aquaria, and pants-wettingly scary Amnesia precursor Penumbra Overture. Every game is DRM-free, Mac- and Linux-compatible, and integratible into Steam. What are you waiting for?
(Also, consider donating to Child's Play through the widget on the right side of the screen. Just two donors so far will get the wonder that will be our Street Fighter Rifftrax! Come on, good readers!)
THQ Gives Away Warhammer 40,000 Ork And Space Marine Ringtones
I know, gimmicky ringtones are so 90's. Still, there's something awesome about Warhammer 40,000, its brutally psychotic universe (and equally psychotic fanbase), and the upcoming WH40K Space Marine FPS, Dark Millennium MMO, and Retribution expansion to the Dawn of War II RTS. It was the universe that inspired Starcraft, and fans have been waiting for non-RTS games worthy of the Warhammer 40,000 name.
To promote Space Marine, THQ is offering WH40K-themed ringtones. Submit your spam-bait email address (you have one just for things like this, right?) to honorguard.spacemarine.com, tell it your network/phone model (if you have a smartphone, just select generic SMS to get a text with a URL pointing you to a downloadable MP3), and get your ridiculously nerdy ringtones. Most free ringtone promotions are ridiculously skeevy, requiring you to text in a request to some number and automatically subscribing to some service you don't want. Don't worry; there's no texting to mystery numbers, and besides email spam about Space Marine, you won't get bugged about stuff.
You can have an Ork legion screaming their battle cry "WAAAGH!," or a Space Marine contingent screaming "For the Emperor!" Sadly, there isn't a ringtone of Chaos Space Marines screaming "Blood for the blood god!" Yet.
Team Fortress 2 Gets Tons Of New Equipment, Commerce, Micro-Transactions
After months and months of Valve teasing us mercilessly with weeks-long previews of individual class updates to Team Fortress 2, they decided to suddenly dump a ton of new content into the game. There are several new pieces of equipment for the Soldier, Pyro, Scout, Sniper, and Spy, and if you collect all of the new equipment for each class and wear them at the same time you get a bonus. That's the good news.
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