Don't Miss Out: GOG Goodness

Seems it's weekend promo time around these here interwebs, and while Steam tries to make the craptastic Aliens vs. Predator more appealing, GOG has graced us with a fantastic deal on two amazing adventure games: Sanitarium, and The Longest Journey. 

But don't take my word for it! Read some other dudes word! Here's a damned good site review for the wonder of Sanitarium by Chackan:

"It's premise is very simple: You control the character, talk to npc's, use items to solve puzzles. The camera is in isometric view, and the graphics are, even if dated, aging really well. Nothing easier and this review could very well be about any generic adventure game out there.

But when you start the game and realize you are in a very uncommon sanitarium, Angel statues become living, deformed children play in a city where all grownups are gone and you can become a comic book character, that's when things start to build up.

You start as an amnesiac male, waking up in one of the most weird and disturbing places i've seen in a videogame. Not knowing who you are or where you are, you start talking to other patients only to realize that there is no one sane...but yourself.

This part serves only as an introduction. The real game starts when you travel to a small town and have your first "chit-chat" with the local children. Not wanting to spoil anybody, let's just say you are in for a really insane experience."

Indeed. Sanitarium was a bit of a sleeper hit, but The Longest Journey was pretty big when it came out. Here's a review by wamu:

"The Longest Journey is a point and click adventure game from the end of the nineties. The story starts with an introduction to April Ryan's life. This 18-year-old protagonist is an art student living in a large futuristic city. After wrestling through the seemingly boring but necessary storyline of meeting her friends, visiting her school and realising they're facing with the same adulthood transition problems of present life, the story gets a lote more interesting.

Ragnar Tornquist, producer and designer, has shown through this game that he is an excellent storyteller. And although the game is set in the future, you can clearly detect references to today's world. Stark, for instance, devoted to science and technology, could easily be a reference to capitalism, while Arcadia, devoted to magic, is a place that only exists in our dreams and heart's desires. These two worlds, which were once united, are in chaos as the line between the two worlds is growing thin. April soon learns that she can shift between these worlds and that she is prophecised with the difficult task of restoring the Balance between these two worlds before it is too late.

The Longest Journey is an original game that has excellent character voices, ambient music, interesting locations and fascinating characters. It's no coincidence that this game made it in the PC Gamer UK's Top 100 games and IGN's top 10 list of point & click adventure games."

They really are both fantastic games and you can grab both of 'em now DRM-free for just the price of takeout. Plus you get the soundtrack for free. So go, buy.

Don't Miss Out: GOG.com 1-Year Anniversary Promo

Yea, so I guess we have ourselves a newborn section here what with all of the deals that have been floating around lately (and all of the post titles including the words "don't miss out").

This one is BIG, and fairly well known already, but if you miss it you'll probably feel such powerful regret that you'll kill yourself. So to prevent mass suicide, I feel I must warn as many as possible.

It's pretty simple: GOG.com, the awesome, awesome, awesome digital distribution site for old PC classics, is 1 year old. They're celebrating by making every game in their Interplay catalog buy one, get one free.

For serious guys, simply check any number of games in the catalog they have here (make sure it's an even number) and get them for half price. Thinking about picking up Fallout for just $6? Get Fallout 2 for free. Thinking of diving into the awesome Descent series? Get the entire series for just $6. Already have those games, no worry, there's 33 games on the list. Surely there's at least 2 fantastic games there that you haven't played.

Let's do some math here. That's 4 games for $12, 6 games for $18, 10 games for $30. 10 for $30 is the same as the amazing Steam sale that happened a few weeks ago.

Or just think, for the price of one crappy AAA title ($60) you could have 20 PC classics.

"BUT Backdoorangel!!!11!!!11!11!!! how do I know if these games are good?"

Seriously? did you read Bobbicus' testimonial? The games are also rated by the community, so you can know that these are some of the best games for the best price. Ever.

There's only about 4 days left to grab these games for this price. If you're going back to school, this is your next 2 months of procrastination. If you're not, well, the point is go and buy some sweet games.

Don't Miss This: Ubisoft Action Deal

Good Old Games is hosting yet another great sale, this time offering two of Ubisoft's finest entries - Beyond Good & Evil and Prince of Persia: Sands of Time at 30% off. If you buy the two together, it's a whopping 50% off. If you enjoy video games in any way, shape, and form and don't already own the GOG versions of these two games, then you must take advantage of this offer. About a decade ago, Ubisoft approached Jordan Mechner, the creator of the original Apple II Prince of Persia game, about reviving the series, but made the rather unusually decision of giving him full creative control. The result was a massive hit in 2003 that lead to two sequels, a rather lame "re-invisioning" game and an upcoming movie - and for good reason. SoT is one of the single best gameplaying experiences I have ever had, second only to Planescape: Torment. Unlike that title, which requires a massive investment in time and emotion, SoT is lighthearted, simple, and completely forgiving. For those who have never heard of the game, you play as a Prince (naturally) who is accompanying his father to visit a nearby sultan. Along the way, they realize they've forgotten to bring a gift, and in order to avoid a rather awkward faux pas they raze a nearby kingdom to the ground and steal its valuables and women to present to the Sultan. In doing so, the young prince loots the Dagger of Time, a powerful artifact that allows the bearer to rewind time. Once the caravan arrives at the palace, a traitorous Vizier tricks the prince into unleashing the Sands of Time, turning everyone in the palace into Zombies. The rest of the game consists of the prince parkouring his way through some pretty awesome scenery and acrobatically slashing sand zombies into tiny pieces. Best of all is the rewinding time feature - at any time you can rewind about 15 seconds into the game. This one feature means that most of the frustrations of a platformer simply disappear - if you miss a tricky jump, there's no need to replay a section, simply rewind and try again! It's fun, it's fast, and it's broken into manageable chunks. SoT also benefits from the fact that Mechner is a professional screenwriter. It's tale is incredibly well crafted, with believable characters who actually grow, humor, and an overall sense of completeness that's missing from most games. Buy it. You won't be disappointed. Beyond Good & Evil, on the other hand, serves as a poster child for how poor marketing can kill a product. Ubisoft released this title with little fanfare in the Christmas rush, pretty much guaranteeing that it would be lost in the deluge. Which it was. Which is a shame, because BG&E is one of the most imaginative, heartwarming and joyous games I've ever played. That may sound strange, especially with a plot involving conspiracies, abductions, and some fucking scary aliens, yet BG&E goes about its business with such goodwill and enthusiasm that it's infectious. If you do not feel charmed by Hyllis, then you have no soul. As for the game itself, the best way to describe it would be Zelda grown up. Much like that venerable series, the game is an action adventure that sees the player traversing a fleshed out world exploring, fighting, and collecting. Unlike the Zelda games, the protagonist is one of the best written characters in videogame history. Not to say that the gameplay isn't entertaining (because it is) but Jade, and her interactions with the other characters, is what makes this game. Even if you don't consider yourself a gamer, or don't really play games, I encourage you to purchase this one and try it out. How many action games have their protagonist wield a camera instead of a gun? Finally, both these games have kick-ass soundtracks, and when you buy them from GOG you get that as well! Also keep in mind that GOG games do not have any form of copy protection whatsoever, and come in a convenient downloader that installs perfectly on XP or Vista. Buy them. Seriously, do it. It's 10 bucks for two of the best games of the last decade that are easy to get into, even for a non-gamer. You don't even need super duper awesome hardware - these games are 5 years old, and scaled well even when they were new. Buy them, or you are not my friend. You have until Monday.

(Maybe) Please Don't Miss Out On This One Too!

Wow, Steam's been going crazy with these weekend deals lately, I mean, what with the indie deal last week, and now this.

So yea, I feel like a dirty promo salesman, but this weekend Steam is selling every Half-Life game for %66 off. meaning you can buy EVERY Half-Life game (including Team Fortress Classic) for $17. OR you can buy them individually for the %66 off.

The only real bummer about this promo is that it's likely you already have most of these games (hell, these games are usually the only reason people installed Steam in the first place). Still, this means it's a good time to gift if you know someone who's never played Half-Life 2 (you can get it individually for just $7).

Of course, if you don't have any of these games, get them. There's no doubt they are of the highest quality. I mean, the Half-Life series is Valve's freakin' crowning achievement. You can get the entire Half-life 1 anthology for just $5, so they've obviously accounted for the fact that you'll have some/most of these, but geez, these are GOG.com prices on what must be the most critically acclaimed PC games ever.

So get out there, get your H.E.V. Suit on, and kill some combine.

Left 4 Community love: A Review of New Add-On Campaigns

So, there's a new Add-Ons manager for Left 4 Dead, and it's pretty sweet. It allows for basically one-click installation of third-party campaigns and mods. This has led to a huge surge in the use of community campaigns. A HUGE one. I don't have numbers, but every time I've looked for games, at least a third of campaigns in the browser that show up are third party. Community maps never get that kind of attention. This is awesome, and it's exactly where PC developers need to be going, because this is the shit that makes the PC awesome (It's also the shit that makes us PC gamers pretentious, but hey, we're only pretentious because we're better). So, with this surge in community awesomeness, there's interestingly enough, a few campaigns that have stood out as being more popular than others. I've played them, I've played the shit out of them, they were delicious, and have definitely kept my interest in a game that supposedly lacks DLC. Let's take a look at them, shall we? First off, Death Aboard:

From what I've seen, Death Aboard is the most popular Add-On campaign by far, and for good reason. It's freakin' great. It was the first full custom campaign to come out, so by the time the manager was available, many of the bugs in the campaign had already been ironed out.

But anyway, in Death Aboard, you start off in a dark and eerie prison complex, and have to find your way from the maze of dark corridors of the prison complex through some sewers to a prison yard, all the while fighting undead inmates. From there, you enter the prison yard, and break out into some urban area, and then to the docks. Use one of these as a safehouse, and then enter the huge cargo ship.

This is one of the coolest parts, the ship is beached, and on it's side, so you have to adjust to the screen being tilted at about a 30 degree angle or more sometimes. There's a lot of water damage and rust, and you must climb up railings and such with caution. You exit through the ships propeller, in one of the most difficult panic events I've come across, and dash into a beach house.

From there you climb up a cliff to a lighthouse for the finale, where you are rescued by a freakin' hot air balloon.

So already, we see there's a ton of creativity here. The only part that I would say really lacks anything is the early prison levels, since they tend to get repetitive. I mean, it is a prison, so the repetition doesn't seem unrealistic, but there's definitely some copypasta going on in some of the corridors. A minor gripe really. The panic events there are also pretty easy even without much planning (and I play everything on at least advanced).

But man, does the ship make up for it, by leaps and bounds. It's been months since I was genuinely scared by L4D until I played that. Even after replaying it several times it is extremely difficult to tell where the hoard will come from. That's something the official Valve maps don't have. There's also an extremely difficult panic event where you try to open the large metal door to get out through the huge propeller. Here pretty much no matter what you do, you will be surrounded by zombies. God help you if a boomer comes.

I'm making it sound a little unbalanced. It's not like it's impossible to do, but on expert I haven't been able to do it in one try. It's tough, but it's set up for some of the greatest gaming moments I've had in months.

The lighthouse finale is actually a tad easier than the boat, though not by much. It reminds me of Zombie D-day, as you're sitting on top of a large beach/hill/cliff/lighthouse, and you can see the hoards come from miles away. This is the opposite of the ship, but works just as well in creating fear, because after unloading a few sniper rifle magazines into the mass of zombies running toward you, you'll realize there's still a ton more. Oh shi-

This would make the tank easier to defeat, but (spoiler) he doesn't always come from the beach, and I've found myself struggling to keep up with the group as we rush from the lighthouse back down to the beach, being pursued by a towering inferno. You also get rescued down by the beach, so there's a ton of different ways to do the finale, all of which are challenging, and really fun.

Wow, that was bit longer than I wanted, anyway, let's check out Night Terror:

Night Terror is significantly more buggy than Death Aboard, but it's totally forgivable, because Night Terror is just filled with awesome. Night terror isn't really a coherent campaign or story, but instead, each level is just something awesome. It was created (mostly) by Nipper, who did a bunch of weird (but awesome) CS 1.6 maps like crazytank. The first level is the mansion from 28 Days Later. You have to progress through it, and there is (of course) a panic event where you hold out in front as the zombies come across the lawn. You really feel like you're in the movie for this one. The second level is an almost exact replica of the Haunted Mansion ride in Disney World. There is a ton of attention paid to detail here, and a lot of work was done to replicate the tacky effects and holograms, all of which become actually scary when zombies come swarming out of every grave. There's even a panic event where you trigger a cart and ride through the graveyard, all the while defending against MASSIVE (and somewhat unbalanced) hoards of zombies. If you make it through, the cart quietly pulls into the exit area, as if nothing happened. It's a great moment. The next level brings you to the freakin' Mines of Moria from The Lord of the Rings. There's a lot of attention to detail in this one as well, though the actual mines get pretty repetitive (the giant hall with pillars is pretty much just that, a lot of pillars). The Tank actually always comes at the same time in this one. Right when you cross the bridge of Khazad-dum, a tank comes where the Balrog does in the movie. And here's the kicker: the fastest way to kill the tank there, is to have one of your members sacrifice himself and jump off of the bridge, the tank will follow, killing you both. FLY, YOU FOOLS! It's fucking epic, and fucking amazing. The next level I'm actually kind of embarrassed about, as I assume it must be from some movie, or book or something, but I can't put my finger on the reference in this one. It's still enjoyable, though, and reminds me of a classic jungle level from Serious Sam. It's jungle ruins, with long corridors lit by moonlight. It is the weakest level. There's not a lot of memorable events and some copypasta is pretty apparent. Though, all is made well when you discover that the next level, the final level, is the cabin from The Evil Dead. You enter through the cabin, and go through a passageway to the wierd, vortexy version of the house from The Evil Dead 2. There you hold out, and get rescued through a vortex, headed toward The Army of Darkness. It's thoroughly enjoyable, though not as difficult as it should be. Still, you will be satisfied. Well, these are going on a tad longer than I'd want, so I think I'll leave Dam it! and Back to School for part 2. Night Terror and Death Aboard are really must-plays, so get out and kill some zombies!

Web Clips for 7/27/09

Ok, so it seems like it was all a bit of a mix-up, involving DDoS. AT&T says they blocked 4chan in order to protect end users from the DDoS, but why? No one's blocking we-got-viruses.com or ultra-flash-download-sucks-bandwidth.net. Plus doing it without notifying 4chan is a dick move whatever the reason. I'm still thinking there's something else behind this. Either way there was some neat planning over at Encyclopedia Dramatica.

An interesting and inventive MJ tribute.

A swingin' mario song.

This is extremely good, and I recommend you pick it up.

Modern Warfare 2 Multiplayer footage. Custom kill streaks!

Cool Thing Of The Week: Jade Speaks French (and Spanish and Italian)

This post is partly inspired on Jake's excellent writeup about Pokémon. Actually, it's sort of the flip side - instead of talking about how outside knowledge can make you appreciate a game more, I'm going to cover how games can bring you outside knowledge. So you've managed to reach basic proficiency in a language, and you want to get better. You also don't really live in an area where your target language is spoken. Reading books and watching foreign films are popular ways of expanding proficiency, but it turns out that quite a few highly regarded games come with built-in translations. Beyond Good and Evil, for instance, allows you to select English, Spanish, French, or Italian each time you play. Evil Genius is available in English, French, Spanish, and German. The original Command & Conquer has a fan made patch which not only expands the resolution to 1024x768 but allows you to select English, French, Spanish, or German as the installed language (plus, it's free!) Stalker and its sequel feature Russian writing and dialogue from all the ambient characters, though all the plot and game dialogue is in English. It would be unacceptable for me to leave out X-Com: UFO and X-Com: Terror from the Deep, classics which are playable in English, French, and German (TFTD also allows Spanish.) Finally, Valve and shows off an overlooked advantage of Steam by allowing you to download any Steam game in any language it was released in. Half-Life 2 has English, French, Spanish, German, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Russian, Japanese, Korean, Thai, Portugese, and Italian. Left 4 Dead even allows you to switch languages on the fly. While there are translations available for almost every game out there that sees an international release, the previously mentioned titles have it built right in (and are usually much higher quality.) I managed to get my hands on a copy of Rouge Alert II, for instance. Good times. In my experience, videogames are actually superior to other forms of media for learning languages. First, there's a lot of repetition involved in a game. In X-Com, every time one of your soldiers fires a gun, you have to click on the icon and be presented with the options "Aimed, Snapshot, Auto, Throw." Over the course of the game, you will see those words hundreds of times. Same instance with C&C, where your units say little confirmation messages when you click on them, give them orders, etc. Memorizing words requires repetition, and most games are all about repeating tasks over and over again. Second, animated games, especially those with in-engine cutscenes, don't suffer from dubbing issues. Beyond Good & Evil, for instance, doesn't match lip movement to dialogue that well in any language, but it doesn't matter, because we're not pulling all the insane detail out of the low-poly models that we normally do out of a real-life, nuanced, human face. Third, the vocabulary and speech you are exposed to in a game is specialized towards your interest area. If you like science fiction things, and play alot of games in a science fiction setting, you're going to be picking up sci-fi vocab, which you probably won't find in a traditional textbook. More importantly, you're hearing it in context, something you can't get out of a dictionary. Also, since you're interested in the subject area, you're more likely to absorb it and use it. Finally, Valve wins again with the Source engine - not only can you turn on closed captioning (which is incredibly thorough - it was designed to allow deaf players to enjoy the game - but the Source Engine's lip-syncing capabilities are pretty damn impressive. Of course, the best games to play would be those produced by and for your target language/culture. Jake's lucky in this regard, as he is a fan of JRPG's, which are (obviously) written in Japanese first for a Japanese audience and then translated, so the Japanese versions contain all the subtlety and cultural identity that tends to be lost in translation. I'm a bit out of luck, since the Arab gaming is pretty much nonexistent, as are Arabic translations of games. Best of all, every game mentioned in this writeup is of outstanding quality, so even if you don't understand exactly what's going on, you're still having a blast. So if you're serious about learning a language, turn some of that down time into study time by playing an awesome game in a foreign language.

The Best Rally Game Ever, for 5 Bucks.

So yea, there's not too many rally games out there, but there's enough. One of the better series out there is Colin McRae Rally. It's made by Codemasters (the guys behind the Dizzy series, Overlord, and a ton of racing games), and is one of their better franchises.

Colin McRae Rally 2005 improved upon a whole lot of new features and updates that happened in CMR 2004, including a new damage system, improved and new playmodes, and a ton of new tracks and cars from over nine countries. It's seriously awesome, and is one of those few racing games that really captures the feel of the dirt road. It's also got a great balance of arcade and realism, leaving (no really) something for everyone.

It's also had a nice revival in the past couple of months, since it's showed up in Good Old Games' catalog, meaning the online multiplayer is pretty populated (though get ready to be reminded of just how much you suck).

Plus, this week it's only 5 bucks. If you are at all interested (even a smidge) in racing games. Pick it up. There's hours of dirty, muddy, breakneck fun to be had here, and it's being pulled from the catalog after this week, so finding it is going to get tough pretty soon. A seriously sweet deal for a great game.

Cool Thing Of The Week: An Adventurer is You!

So with LucasArts unloading its back catalogue on steam, and Monkey Island getting both a facelift and a new episode, adventure titles seem to be coming back into vogue. I have no less than 3 adventure games to finish on my to-do list (Monkey Island, Grim Fandango, and Sanitarium) and yet I find myself waylaid by a low-budget production by a pair of insolent limeys. Been There, Dan That is the first game in the series, and it's bloody hilarious. It's a classic point-and-click - right clicking cycles through possible actions, left clicking interacts with objects and the environment. The protagonists - Ben and Dan, of course - merrily adventure their way through alternate-dimension locals, bantering back and forth about everything from shitty American beer to how exactly Ben knows which objects are useful to pick up and which are safe to leave behind. It's full of references that seasoned adventure fans will love, and coarse (but brilliant) humor for everyone else. It's irreverent, clever, entertaining, short, and most importantly, free. Once you've finished it (and hopefully tossed some of a bizarre "L" shaped currency to the creators) then it's time to fork over a whopping $5 for the sequel Time Gentlemen, Please! Which is bigger, flashier, and even more irreverent (in the options menus, there's a slider labeled "Racism.") The story follows immediately after the end of the first game, and while it provides a quick recap for those who haven't got the time for fun you really should play through the first one...er...first. I'm not really going into the plot details because I don't think I'll be able to do it justice, but I will say this: The main antagonists are armies of Cloned Nazi Dinosaurs. Really, there's not much more for me to say. If you enjoy adventure games, you will enjoy these. You might enjoy them even if you hate the genre - the mental leaps required to figure out the puzzles are refreshingly clever and logical, unlike certain abominations. Buy 'em. Play 'em. Support clever people who write fun games. Also, Gibbage is pretty fun, too.

That's The Second Biggest Monkey Island I've Ever Seen!

Yup, tomorrow is the day. Telltale games (the guys who made the new Sam and Max season 1 and 2 episodic titles) will, after almost 10 years of a dead franchise, release the first of a five part episodic series: Tales of Monkey Island.

Now, I'm as scared as you, because this could be a total franchise killer. I mean, monkey island 4 (and many would say 3) wasn't very good. The humor lost a lot of its wit and most people didn't like the new style. If this game turns out to be a bust, I can't see the Monkey Island series going many more places. Especially since it hasn't been anywhere in 10 years.

But, if anyone can do justice to the franchise, it's Telltale (no, not LucasArts, as they're too busy churning out yet another Star Wars title). This little developer-that-could scored ultra-cult-big with their new Sam and Max games, proving that they have the stuff that old LucasArts was made of. They've also wowed plenty with Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People (though admittedly that one was a love-it-or-hate-it game, but so is HomeStarRunner's humor, so what were you expecting?).

The design director is Dave Grossman, who created the first two games along with Ron Gilbert and Tim Schafer. Sure the whole team isn't back together, so Grossman's child-friendly humor is probably much more prominent, but hey, one is better than none. In addition to Grossman, Telltale's got what looks like a mighty fine line-up of writers, designers, directors, and programmers who all got their chops from the old classic LucasArts adventure games. Check out some gameplay, it seems pretty decent at least:

Anyway, even if this turns out to be a total bust, LucasArts is remaking the original (how like them). So if this one sucks, you can always play that. I'm not really one to believe hype, but I'm pretty confident I'll enjoy this game. Though (and this is unrelated) I've got to finish Conkers Bad Fur Day first.

Web Clips for 7/1/09

Sorry about my recent infrequent posting, work is sucking up a bit more time than normal, Bobbicus seems to be picking up the slack, though. And I'll be getting off my ass as soon as I can. Anyway. Love Letters From Dick. The RPS review of Arma 2, I'm intrigued. You know FMyLife (if not then here), now check out MyLifeIsAverage.