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Freebies and/or bargains

Started by bluemeanie, 19 April, 2012, 02:09:17 PM

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shaolin_monkey

Just Cause 2 is particularly fantastic if you have nVidia 3D Vision.

Keef Monkey

Man, I bought that months ago on a Steam or a GoG sale (I forget which) and it's still not been booted up! Heard so many great things but just haven't got round to it yet. I'm having an embargo on PC game purchases until I play the ones I have I think.

CrazyFoxMachine

Right - to make up for an embarrassing e-scam post here (and on FB and Twitter :S Groan they got me right where I'm vulnerable... my Steam lust) there is a game going on Midweek Madness this week for 69p that is an absolute belter!



Really nice and arty and very playable -definitely worth a play! Again, if unsure there's a grand demo!

jackstarr

Magrunner: Dark Pulse is currently FREE for 24 hours from gog.com - never heard of the game, but it's described as "technology meets cthulhu" and looks vaguely like a portal-style platform/puzzler.  Worth a download, I thought!

NapalmKev

A double dose of Freebies on XBOX Live until the end of the month.

Streetfighter 4 arcade edition - not a bad game, but some of the character designs seem a bit off. Also not as fluent as SF Alpha 2, but It's alright cos It's free.

Charlie Murder - haven't played this yet, but it has an interesting visual style.

Cheers
"Where once you fought to stop the trap from closing...Now you lay the bait!"

Goaty

Titanfall free on EA Origins for 48 hours if anyone want to try and see if it work on their PC!

The Enigmatic Dr X

Bioshock
Bioshock 2
Mafia 2
Darkness 2
Bureau XCOM Declassified
Spec Ops The Line
Xcom Enemy Unknown
Bioshock Infinited

All on the current Humble Bundle. Most are available for $7 all in. Pay $20 for Xcom Enemy Unknown and Bioshock Infinite.

Worth it for Spec Ops and Darkness 2 alone.
Lock up your spoons!

ThryllSeekyr

I just brought Rust and Gods Will be Watching.......

And I think that will be it for me this fortnight!

Keef Monkey

Quote from: The Enigmatic Dr X on 09 July, 2014, 01:40:03 AM
Bioshock
Bioshock 2
Mafia 2
Darkness 2
Bureau XCOM Declassified
Spec Ops The Line
Xcom Enemy Unknown
Bioshock Infinited

All on the current Humble Bundle. Most are available for $7 all in. Pay $20 for Xcom Enemy Unknown and Bioshock Infinite.

Worth it for Spec Ops and Darkness 2 alone.

That's an amazing bundle. Love the Bioshock games (but everyone has probably played them by now) but Darkness 2 is a real underrated gem, I loved it.

CheechFU

Spec ops makes you do this  :o

The Enigmatic Dr X

Quite. Which is why I said its worth it for both
Lock up your spoons!

J.Smith

Quote from: CheechFU on 09 July, 2014, 12:24:28 PM
Spec ops makes you do this  :o

More like:  :)  :|  :o  :(  :'(  :'(  :'(  >:(  :(  >:(  :(  >:(  :( and so on until you come to:  :'( :'( :'(. Here's my vague recommendation of sorts to hopefully pique some curiosity about it...

It's not very often I quit games to "take a break" from them, with an intention of revisiting them later. Typically I only do so because something else grabs my attention instead, and I only ever abandon a game I paid money for completely if I find it too shit to continue (e.g. F.E.A.R. 3 that I wasted several hours of my life on before uninstalling it), but I occasionally stop playing a game for a specific reason tied to it. For example, with stress levels at their peak by the time I reached the Prison area of Amnesia: The Dark Descent, I simply could not go on any longer and gave it a few days break (which didn't help when I returned, mind you). Without spoiling why, let's just say that The Line (which should have been the only part of its title really) made me feel...rather bad to be playing.

The only other game I can think of off the top of my head that I had a similar reaction with is Far Cry 2 (although not the third game, which is actually trying to be very similar to The Line, I feel, difference being that it fails miserably) in which the guy you spend the whole game trying to kill gives you a reality check. The difference is: whereas my reaction there was a thoughtful "Huh" as I contemplated this and carried on, my reaction with The Line was more along the lines of, "Oh dear god, what have I done?!??" and carrying on, a weird mixture of feeling guilty, sad and angry all at once.

It's not long enough like Amnesia that you may quit several times yet find plenty left to do when you return. No, I only quit the two or three times with this. But - without spoiling what happens - I will say that there is one single moment in this game, the brilliantly executed turning point of the story, that I can almost guarantee would make you jump to the main menu and quit the fucking thing, even if you have never quit a game for any specific reason before.

How the game, and the player's perspective to it, changes from this point onwards I think is what decides whether you'll quit completely or reluctantly go on, and if that all sounds melodramatic, I would counter with the point that it's perhaps the only game you can read very serious forum posts and the like from players in moral dilemma about continuing to play.

It's a fun game like that (an intentionally generic third person shooter actually, though I won't spoil why), but it's a damn well brilliantly designed one and definitely worth soldiering on through once. Unless you were admiring the design of it or researching it like some guy did for a book he wrote on it alone (an eBook called Killing is Harmless if you're curious), however, I can't honestly see a reason to want to touch it ever again once you're done. It's a bad, bad game but, um, you should play it...?

Keef Monkey

Have to admit I don't really get the fuss with that game. I thought it was an ok shooter, and there were a couple of bits that made me feel a little bit of The Horror Of War, but I think after everyone making a huge deal about the story and the narrative I maybe expected it to do more with it. It wasn't all that interesting and I spent the whole thing right from the start thinking 'I bet it ends with <insert spoiler>, nah, that would be way too obvious and would make no sense'. And then it ended just like that.

It gets kudos points for scoring one gunfight to 'Glasgow Mega Snake' by Mogwai, but loses them again for the audio department not even bothering to find a loop point in the song so it repeats smoothly if the gunfight drags on longer than the track. It just stops really abruptly and then starts again from the beginning after a few seconds silence. 5mins work that would have taken.

So aye, afraid I'm a bit lukewarm on Spec Ops. Still well worth playing for the price though, and the other games in the pack are fantastic.

J.Smith

Quote from: Keef Monkey on 10 July, 2014, 09:19:46 AM
Have to admit I don't really get the fuss with that game. I thought it was an ok shooter, and there were a couple of bits that made me feel a little bit of The Horror Of War, but I think after everyone making a huge deal about the story and the narrative I maybe expected it to do more with it. It wasn't all that interesting and I spent the whole thing right from the start thinking 'I bet it ends with <insert spoiler>, nah, that would be way too obvious and would make no sense'. And then it ended just like that.

The ending was predictable for me too, but that was because one of the guys working on it mentioned Apocalypse Now / Heart of Darkness (another reason why Far Cry 2 is similar) as inspiration running up to release, I believe. You can see the influence as soon as you get into it anyway, which I suppose does make it predictable; but then again, going by the audience they were aiming the game at, I'm sure it still surprised many people, hence the big fuss over it.

WARNING: SPOILERS OF SORTS FROM HERE ON OUT

And to be honest, I think it does deserve the praise. Unlike Far Cry 3, it does a far better job at making you hate seeing the game through to the end (if you do at all), which was a problem in Far Cry 3's case because that game was way too much fun (once I installed Ziggy's Mod anyway) for you to possibly feel the guilt the developers were aiming for. That wasn't a problem with The Line, not only because it wasn't really much fun in the gameplay department (if it were, as the developers cleverly avoided, it simply wouldn't have worked), but because the writing was much better too.

From Far Cry 3's beginning I couldn't get behind Brody as the character as I was playing as and certainly felt no guilt by the game's stupid ending, but The Line reversed that idea by having the player grow more distant from Walker instead, as he begins to, for example, sound like the kind of excited teenagers you hear using mics on online multiplayer shooters as you direct him to kill more people. It's excellent little design decisions like that that really pulled me in its favour. Besides the obviously clever choice of setting, who your "enemies" are, and what your own role in the game world is from the outset (one particularly brilliant rug pull is the reminder at the end of the game that you were only supposed to recon the area; not go charging in - but the thought never really crosses your mind as a player), the game's simply filled with a lot of much smaller touches, some of which the devs pointed out in interviews after release, that really pull the experience together tremendously well.

There's the level design with its symbolism scattered around the place; there's its gameplay mechanics, which don't change over the course of the game at all, but the player's willingness to perhaps use them do (the executions you can perform as a melee attack are a useful tool throughout the game, but they become increasingly more violent as Walker develops as a character, straying very far away from the immediate kills or knockouts of before; and the slow motion headshots cease to be all that exciting either); there's the very subtle things that reflect Walker's state of mind, many of which certainly went unnoticed in my case (there's different meanings to how the game fades out from cutscenes to either black or white, which I highly doubt anyone noticed on their playthrough), not mention the slow change in the two side characters as well; and hell, there's even the choice of who should voice the player's character, who some genius at Yager decided had to be Nolan North, none other than Nathan Drake of the Uncharted trilogy.

So, yeah, I think it's brilliant. A merely okay shooter, yes, and therefore a game with mediocre gameplay, but it's a game masterfully designed, I feel, and what I think's especially amazing is that all these little things only feed the game's narrative and the player's experience of the game, rather than overcomplicating it.

The only other thing I would point out, which perhaps plays a part in deciding what you think about the game as a whole, is its target audience, which is of course fans of shooters. If you're intimate with those I think you can appreciate the game a great deal more for what it does. Here's a game that begins in medias res with you firing a minigun from a helicopter, a typical on-rails shooting gallery moment from your average linear shooter. A few hours later and the developers deliver a punch to the gut that changes your perspective of the game entirely, and those it's replicating the gameplay of. By the end they all but break the fourth wall through a character who asks you a brilliantly delivered question - a question I won't spoil, of course, but to which the answer is simply a sad "No" by that point - as you take an elevator to one of three pretty fucking devastating endings.

...I'ma shut up now. :-X

ThryllSeekyr

I've been playing RUST and it's brutally bloody brilliant game. For all of it's lack of polish, and logic that just doesn't make sense to me. I've become addicted to playing it almost non stop until I could afford to make a wooden cabin (Not the pre-fab Wooden-Shelter, but a real cabin with it's own foundation, walls, window and roof!) which needs to be made from planks, which use up a lot of wood from the trees.

Now that I have a sleeping bag to put I've stopped playing.....for now!

I have been killed by other player just four times, but mainly on other different servers.

The second I got so pissed off about this, that I ended up raiding the boxes in two shelters, that I had found left open. Yet, I tried to give back the Pick-Axe, Blood-Draw-Kit, (Just what the hell do you need blood for in this game?) Gunpowder, (But no gun!) and tried return them to the exact location where I found them when I had otherwise equipped myself. Yet, got so lost, I had problems relocating the building/structures where I found and died of starvation before I could get any further.

A lot of the other reasons for my dying, seem like such dumb mistakes on my part.....

It might have been just didn't travel far enough to find enough food grazing in the grass or taking on bear or wolf before worked out how to fire at them while running backwards with a bow and arrow in my hand.

Though, I don't understand why I can option rare items from killing the wolves and bears and even more rare items from their mutated counterparts.

Also dying from a bleeding wound taken from falling or the above mentioned wandering predators. Wether, I could prepare for this before (Like having food (It's always chicken, no matter what animal it's taken from!) and camp-fire set-up or in my inventory before-hand) I start hurting too badly and then dying.

I would often build the most ruditmentary of bases right at the top of those rocky places and forget how to relocate them and then start building all over again somewhere else.

I remember one time, when I had survived about three or four nights after leaving wooden shelters, surrounded by wooden walls  and filled them with a work-bench, a forge or kiln and left storage-boxes on the top of foundations because that game server wouldn't allow me to put them anywhere safer. I had amassed a lot of wood from the wood piles and trees, and a lot of various types of stone and got killed by a bear I couldn't shoot properly.

On one server the four legged animals were virtually non-existent and I just died from their lack of involvement in my game. I now realise that I was meant to just hunt other players on that one.

While, I'm setting up my base...(Something that I am most admittedly very slow at...) I do try to avoid other players and will just collect or hunt for resources while sneaking in the long grass if I hear a lot of gunshot or see them hunting animals or each other. It's best to avoid the settlements and other peoples building. Otherwise they will find me and shoot me for resource gathering on what they perceive to be their own territory. In this game, I thinks it's basically anything that it's watched, tied downed or have a fence or wall around is anybodies for the taking. Of course, I would hate this happen in real life. (Or does it :o)

I would find the most resources on most game servers to be more plentiful near where they are settlements and other player's buildings/structures/guards-towers and other fortications.

Natureally..... :-\

Anyway, I have been approached by some friendly players (At least they were or were pretending to be...) who wanted to group, trade or just help and let them know I really wanted to get my shit together before I start grouping. I think it's a unwritten law that you must prove you can survive in this game while contributing to it yourself before trusting compete stranger or even people you my know in real life that play the game. I know I would turn my back on any of the people I know.

I have noticed that other players on one server where surprising friendly when I said I was lost and wanted to return some stuff I raided, but never used and couldn't find the buildings I found them in. (Mentioned earlier.)  Yeah, put up with my bullshit for while and even the one that shot me in a earlier game said I sounded like descent fella. I eventually succumbed to starvation after wandering in a large area where there was no grazers.

I really want to set myself up in this game before I get to much help from others.

Right now I have that building built and for the first time I got left my sleeping bag in it. It's supposed to allow me to re-spawn there if I die. Yet, I disconnected from the game while I was in the process of starving. The cabin I built is just below some large but squat grassy hills. There doesn't appear to be any life other than trees and rocks for leages around me and I'm still completely naked.

Well, at least I will respawn back there when I die.

Some things I don't understand about the game.

Trees, remain where they are...still standing after I've chopped wood from them.

I can do this with just the starter-rock in my hand. (Yet, at least that is a step up from punching trees in Mine-Craft.)

I can carry a lot of materials, as well as very large items like wooden-planks, and other large building materials I've crafted without the use of a wagon to carry them in. That is hard to ignore.

Being able to obtain, more advance mining-implements, advanced fire-arms and blue-prints from killing wolves and bears. There is a history of this happening a lot in games that can be drawn as far back as the original Bard's-Tale series.   

Yet, I understand, this game is still in Alpha or Beta and they wil be improving it and adding more stuff I hope.

Stuff, I want to see....

Ranches, where there are horses, that can be ridden and farms where there smaller animals being bred and raised for food as well as grown food.

Hi-Tech-Upgrades...like Laser weapons, power-suits and eventually cars, trucks, planes and space-ships.

Now, I go back to playing more of Elite-Dangerous...I been playing both games back to back.