It’s Week 4 for PC Digital Download sales, and both Steam and Direct2Drive are shaken up as new releases come out. Civilization V is still there though, because PC gamers love Civilization! There’s also a few other releases that may or may not have been trampled by Civilization V.
I started up Civilization V with a degree of trepidation. While the previous versions were great games, they always felt like rehashes of the same Civilization II that I played oh so long ago but with added gimmicks and window dressing. At its core, the game’s features continued to remain mostly the same but with graphical updates; the biggest changes were the addition of cultural borders and the new victory conditions, mainly taken from a spinoff, Alpha Centauri. In Civilization V, the game has been significantly overhauled, removing a great deal of interface in favor of simplification, vastly improving combat, making social control more customizable as well as reducing mass unit and city micromanagement. But you know, these scary new changes might actually be a good thing.
Got no life? No friends, no love, no money? Just five dollars left before your Visa card is maxed out? Well that’s all you’ll need for a whole weekend of entertainment with this week’s crop of weekend sales. It’s time to get serious. Serious Sam, that is.
Those nice folks at Good Old Games.com collectively yanked our chains over the weekend. Their website was shut down, replaced with a tearful farewell stating that the company couldn’t continue in its current form, yet offering assurances that customers would be able to download recently-purchased items. Now its clear that it was all a lie! A horrible, horrible lie, and Gog.com will be back in business this week.
With Final Fantasy XIV being released on September 30th, it’s about time that we know how it works. There’s been a beta since July, but it’s remarkably easy not to get any coverage on this game, as it’s been flying a bit under the radar since announcement. However, there’s been a lot of information about classes and gameplay released on the blogs, so it’s not completely under wraps. XIV could be considered pure fan service, but without the gameplay from XI (the other MMO), it is actually trying to be a solid MMO, and not just fan service.
Valve’s Portal was a game that broke the rules. A first-person shooter without shooting? This was a game that forced you to consider the environment your challenge, providing you with nothing but a tool to connect two spatial points and an impetus to use your brain to defeat said challenge. Of course, the mind constructing these puzzles for you added a great deal to the mythos and prestige of the title, as GLaDOS kept the player sharply enmeshed with both dark humor and malevolence. The popularity of the game was not in doubt, as even merchandise was created to capitalize on the characters and even inanimate objects; the game itself was shipped to consoles as a package with other valve titles in the Orange Box. Truly, the cake was not a lie. And now, to the happiness of gamers everywhere, Portal 2 has been announced (as a full-length game, no less).
Don’t miss the final day of the Indie Summer of Love Bundle, which will get you up to twelve indie games for 80% off. A great deal on all of those artsy smartsy games you should be playing, like Machinarium, And Yet It Moves, and AaaaAAAaaaA!!!
