This week on PC Digital Download Sales, Impulse will be added to the weekly listings. Impulse sales will be counted the same way as Steam and Direct2Drive sales, at 3:00 PM on Sundays. Last week, Civilization V was cleaning house, and that’s still the same here, though not on Impulse. Steam also supported lots of new releases last week, but that’s been quelled a little this week.
Lately Sears has been using a series of TV ads called “The Sears Blue Crew” in which a band of zany actors dress as Sears salespersons in light-hearted commercials. One of those whacky actresses was nerd diva Felicia Day from The Guild. The odd thing about this ad was that Felicia was playing the role of “Sears Salesgirl” selling washing machines. She wasn’t “Celebrity Felicia Day” saying “Hello, I’m Felicia Day from the popular web series The Guild. I buy all my graphics cards from Sears.”
It’s a great weekend for sales on downloadable PC games this week. All of the major online stores are either winding down a big sale, or just starting one, so have a look at this mountain of cheap games you can grab if you act fast.
Not to use hyperbole, but the best browser-based game ever has just been released. Have you ever been so infuriated by something you saw on the internet that you wanted to kill the whole web page? Well, now you can with Erik Rothoff’s Asteroids bookmarklet. It puts the tiny triangular spaceship from Asteroids on your browser page, and lets you blast way at the text and images of whatever page you’re reading.
Company of Heroes, by Relic Entertainment has been nearly a gold standard for real-time strategy games for over four years. The gameplay had been refined and defined by earlier releases from Relic in the form of Dawn of War, a Warhammer 40k RTS, and its expansions. Released in 2006, Company of Heroes perfected the system developed in Dawn of War and impressed the gaming world with flawless squad-based unit management and historically accurate scenarios, troops and equipment. It had deformable terrain and a real-time cover creation system, in which squads could take advantage of cover created on purpose of by result of battles. A peaceful French countryside often became a crater-scarred mess, allowing soldiers to automatically hide in the rubble on the fly. By some twist of fate, Relic has seen it appropriate to take the quality of Company of Heroes and make it freely available in the form of Company of Heroes Online.
The cliché of an amnesiac protagonist has long been a staple of bad video game writing. Plenty of games start out with the player awakening in an unknown place, with no name, no idea how he arrived there; the goal being to walk down the only available hallway and explore. It’s a cheap way to tell the player “There’s no story, just run down the hall and kill everything”. However, Frictional Games has taken this outdated idea, and built a brilliant story-based, intellectual game around it with Amnesia: The Dark Descent.
There’s a tornado warning today in New York City, so I’ll spend the day cowering inside, playing with all the cheap games I’ll buy with these Mid-Week sales. Even if there’s no tornado scare where you live, it’s not a bad idea to stock up… just in case.
