Thursday 31 May 2012

The Graduation Bundle


So it is Indie Royale time once again. This bundle includes a total of 6 games and a music bonus if you pay over $7, you'll get Cheap Dinosaurs' acclaimed self-titled chiptune-rock album (which you can stream for free via the link above), though the minimum for just the games sits at about £3. The games included are:
All of the games except Dead Pixels (an Indie Royale exclusive PC debut and LaserCat are available on Steam, and all but The Ship (which includes 2 extra giftable Steam keys) are available on Desura. Check out UnfairReviews if you want to know a little more about each game, each video is one a couple minutes long and worth checking out.


Wednesday 16 May 2012

The All Charity Lightning Pack


Indie Royale have yet another bundle on the go and the profits from this one will go entirely to charity. What ever you pay is split between Amnesty International, EFF, Action Aid and Unicef. You can split your payment on Humble Bundle and Indie Gala between charity, developers, and the bundle company, only it is split between the 4 charities mentioned above instead. The games included in this bundle are:
All of these games are available as DRM free versions, or redeemable on Steam (except The Shivah) and Desura. The Minimum for the 4 games above is £2.63 as of writing this, however if you pay over $7 (about £4.30ish) you also get 3 bonus albums:
So as per usual I will be buying this bundle as I do with damn near every bundle after I get paid on Friday. You have about 99 hours left to get in on this bundle so by my math it should end about 7pm GMT this Sunday. For a review of the bundle check out The Backlog Journey and also the YouTube video below, he covers all indie bundles so give him a subscribe if you want reviews of future bundles.

Friday 11 May 2012

Blizzard and Valve Make Up


A while back there was some legal issues between Valve and Blizzard about Valve making Dota 2, Dota originally being a Warcraft mod. But this has been sorted out according to the guys at PC Gamer where I found out about this. (The italic paragraph below is quoted from the PC Gamer article about this linked above)

Valve will retain the commercial trademark to DOTA, and will not be required to change the name of their upcoming title DOTA 2, a stand-alone sequel to the Warcraft III map. Blizzard, however, will retain the right to use the DOTA name non-commercially. This includes promoting DOTA-style maps made for Blizzard games by the community. Their in-house DOTA successor, formerly known as Blizzard DOTA, will be renamed to Blizzard All-Stars while keeping the core gameplay mostly unchanged. 


The great Gaben in the sky has commented about this ordeal stating “We’re pleased that we could come to an agreement with Blizzard without drawing things out in a way that would benefit no one,” “We both want to focus on the things our fans care about, creating and shipping great games for our communities.”

I don't like it when mum and dad fight and am glad they've kissed and made up.

Friday 4 May 2012

Indie Gala IV


I'm a little late writing about this bundle as it went live a few days ago, can't remember exactly when but Indie Gala have a nice little bundle of 9 games (7 of which are available as Steam downloads) so long as you pay over the minimum which at the time of me writing this is $5.19 (£3.20). So paying even the minimum it works out at about 35p a game, how can you go wrong with that. The games included in this bundle are:

This bundle has just over 11 days left until it ends, so if my maths is correct it should be ending midnight GMT on Tuesday 15th of May. As I am currently skint at this moment in time that will give me plenty of time to find a few quid for this. Also If you want a review of all the games involved check out The Backlog Journey, he seems to cover just about every indie bundle in existence.

Thursday 3 May 2012

The May Hurray Bundle


Would you believe it? We have yet another Indie Royale bundle on the go. This one is obviously for the May Day holiday given the bundles name. This bundle includes the following 5 games:
All of these games are available on Desura, and all but Weird Worlds is available as a Steam download. I would personally get this bundle purely for Dungeon Defenders, it's a multiplayer coop tower defence game, I have only played the demo but I have heard many good things from people who have played the game, this game has been on my list for a while so what's a better time to get it than during a sale like this. Anyway as with every Indie Royale bundle you can pay what you want so long as you meet the minimum which stands at just over £3 at the point of me writing this and the offer ends in just over 6 days time which is handy because I'm skint until Tuesday and I reckon I will be picking this one up. Also check out The Backlog Journey, there is a write up of all the games included in this bundle.

EA Indie Bundle?


Yes, thats right I used EA and indie in the same sentence. But according to Indie Game Magazine an EA Indie Bundle has been registered on Steam. Now I have always classed indie games and developers are those that are independent of publishers so by definition EA can not technically have an Indie Bundle as every game in here they are in fact publisher to and not developer. None the less they are apparently getting in on some indie game action as it seems to be quite the growing trend at the moment.

This bundle will consist of the following 6 games:

This bundle will cost you £14.38 saving you just over £30 if you were to buy these games at their usual price. You can also buy the games in this bundle individually if you happen to have some of the games in question already at a 50% discount of the usual price. This offer is running until the 9th of May and I would suggest if anything get Deathspank for cheap out of this. The other games I haven't played so I can't really say how good or bad they are, but Deathspank and it's sequels are awesome.

Tuesday 1 May 2012

Should used games be abolished?


I was reading an article on Gamerant about how Crytek developers are in favour of the next generation consoles blocking of used games. While I understand why developers would want this to happen and would obviously be in favour of this: It could potentially lead to more sales of new games making them more money.

This has happened already on the PC side of gaming with the majority of PC games these days having some sort of DRM, be it Steam, Origin or Ubisofts always online DRM system which everyone loves to hate. The Point I'm getting to is that it seems that consoles may be taking a page out of the PCs side of the industry should rumours be true.

Since this has already happened over with the PC community and me primarily being a PC gamer, I am used to this anyway and it isn't as big of a deal to me as it is to a lot of console gamers. But due to the fact I can't buy used games on PC any more, places like Steam have realised this and took advantage with all there constant sales, now instead of buying used games I just wait until they go on sale and buy them cheap. My theory is if these rumours are true, consoles and developers should take a page out of Valves book and do something similar sale wise to keep customers happy.

At the end of the day though, I don't agree with this business practice. I'm all for companies trying to up sell their products it is a business after all and of course they need to make money. But to me this logic is ridiculous. Let's put this mentality into perspective shall we? Say I buy a brand new car, then after a while of using it I decide to sell it for whatever reason; to buy a better one, because I need the money or I just plain don't want it any more. Should the car manufacturer get a cut of my sale of a product which is rightfully mine now? No, of course they shouldn't, they set a price that they thought reasonable to make back the money the initially spent building it. Therefore after I paid said initial price the car would be mine to do whatever I please with. If I want to sell it on, destroy it, keep it forever and add to my collection, it is might right to have a choice in what I do with it as it now belongs to me. 

This logic is the same for the likes of books, dvds, furniture and damn near everything that you can physically buy. There are many places that have made businesses out of selling used goods, look at Gamestop, Love Film (renting by post, not the online version), used car lots, Blockbuster (not sure if they are in business anymore but you get my point), charity shops, eBay and the list goes on, that's just a few off the top of my head. But if you stop used goods from being sold you will destroy many businesses and cause job loses for even more people, which is exactly what we need right now (going to stop here or I will get in to a rant about politics and I can't be arsed with it). The fact of the matter is this does not happen in any other industry why should the gaming industry be the exception.