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Scaryness and Batness

When March arrived, for £6.49 I bought Amnesia: The Dark Descent, a fantastic independent title which has a rather unique coup de grace for the bored gamer. This is a first person gothic horror adventure game, with essences of point and click, combined with some physics, a lot of darkness and HP Lovecraft inspired terror. You start out with no memory, and as you go through what can best be described as a nightmare, you'll be (hopefully) scared witless long before the end.

You see, in Amnesia, you have no weapons and you can't kill anything. So you can only run away and hide in the dark, or dive into a room and shove furniture against the door, or in some instances hide in a cupboard. The whole game is built around scaring you, and when played late at night with all the lights off (that's how I did it!) it can really make you jump.



If the original game wasn't enough, there are loads of bonus adventures written by fans which you can install and play once the main affair is complete, along with a second much smaller and harder adventure to solve.

The same month, I also bought Batman: Arkham Asylum - Game of the Year edition for a mere £3.75. Now this game looks fantastic, with a lot of really high resolution textures and great models. I've had a lot of fun playing this so far, and fully intend on completing this one as well. The only issue for me here is some 3D games give me motion sickness, so I'm limited by how long I can play them for. Batman is one of those, but not as bad as others.



So that takes us up to £20.72, not even yet the price of a full brand new title yet.


Summer Madness

July saw Steam's regular Summer sale kick in, and I did buy quite a bit in this. Deus Ex: Game of the Year edition and Deus Ex: Invisible War both got bought for a few pounds. I also bought Fallout 3: Game of the Year edition for £6.79, which is an interesting highly rated apocalyptic FPS RPG that will keep me amused for months.



Talking of RPGs, I got Neverwinter Nights 2: Platinum edition for £5.09, which is basically NWN2 with all the expansions. I dread to think how many hours that will take to complete, I suspect the answer is more than lots. The interface is a bit clunky and the graphics have dated a tiny bit, but it still holds interest for the old nerdy part of me that enjoyed Dungeons & Dragons as a kid.

If you like a bit of shooting, then Team Fortress 2 is now completely free to play, so there is something you can enjoy without spending anything at all!

But let's finish this up with talk of driving games, and one in particular that cost me £6.79. Codemasters' F1: 2010 is an amazing Formula 1 racing title, with graphics that are just frighteningly realistic. I grew up on Revs for the BBC Micro, and remember Geoff Crammond's Formula 1 Grand Prix on the PC from DOS days. I've not really played them much since then, so this seemed a great opportunity to give it a bash.



Talk about anal levels of realism, which thankfully you can tweak a fair bit to make it more fun. The online play is great, although it lacks the ability to view other cars and your lap times once you complete a race. But hay the amount of time I've spent playing this so far, I'm not going to complain about the little things.

And lastly my latest purchase, another Codemasters racer, Grid. For £2.99 I forgive the fact that they turned off the online racing servers and forced us to spend hours trying to get a VPN working so we could use the LAN feature, which eventually we did thanks to Wippien.



Not designed to be the most accurate racer there is, the graphics are really top notch and the mere fact you can crash into other players whilst racing against each other makes it worth the pennies. Because you see my friends and I, we do like a manic race in which crashing is often involved. You can't beat a good pile up, heck whole racing franchises have been built on this feature alone.


Conclusion

I've said it before and I'll say it again, life moves pretty fast and if you stop and take a look around in a while, you can have a lot of fun cheaply. I've bought Civilization III: Complete for £2.54, every X-Com game for £1.70, and a bunch of others to boot.

If money is tight, then keep an eye on these sort of sales. Which I suspect will become even more frequent what with Amazon UK about to launch their own game download service. The more places that offer games legitimately for purchase as downloads, the more sales there are likely to be, and the more a discerning buying can have great gaming fun for the price of some nail polish or a few beers.

And if there is a specific title you are after, providing it is on Play.com, Steam, the AppStore or Amazon.UK, then you can always try the Reviewer Bargain Watcher. It'll check the prices daily and mail you when it is going cheap, so you don't have to!
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Posted by Robert John Shepherd