NightSky, from the second bundle, had a Linux version added recently. The Linux version only exists because it was part of the latest Humble Indie Bundle, and HIB actively require Linux ports, but it was added by Indie Royale as soon as it was available.

Also in the second bundle, Charlie Knight's games Scoregasm, and Irukandji and Bullet Candy Perfect (bonus inclusions to the bundle) all include Linux versions, and have since they were added to the bundle. Again, Charlie has always made Linux ports for his games, and these Linux versions were all pre-existing, but they did make them downloadable from the beginning.

So they don't have many linux games, and they don't spur the creation of Linux ports at all. And I don't really get the impression Linux ports factor into the decisions at all regarding whether to include a game or not. But they do still add the Linux port if it's available, even post-bundle.

I'm pretty sure the announced "Old City" patch came out just before the free weekend, Steam's been trying to download the 1.2GB patch for the last few days, any time my laptop goes online.

http://store.steampowered.com/news/6666/

It says it includes the two new maps, the tower, and the new weapon, though not as additional for-pay DLC, just as content in the patch.

IPv6 Day is working great from here. I'd forgotten about it until I tried pinging google.com and saw a v6 address!

I have installed a Firefox addon to show a site's IP address, and it's been fun seeing how many sites are running on IPv6 today!

Also on sale is Metro 2033 as Steam's Weekend Deal, for 50% off ($10). But today (Friday) GamersGate is having a "Deal of the Day" on Metro 2033 for 75% off ($5).

No matter where you buy it, Metro 2033 registers on and requires Steam, so the GamersGate deal gives you exactly the same thing (a Steam copy) but undercuts Steam's price a good bit.

As I post this, GamersGate's sale is set to expire in ~16 hours, so be sure to jump on it if you're thinking of getting Metro this weekend.

Tumbler wrote on Apr 15, 2011, 13:26:
Hmm, no mention on the page, adding to cart, well look at that. Portal 2 for 39.99 and potato sack drops to 33.72, $10 savings for buying them together. Was this advertised somewhere?

Weird. They have a Portal 2 + Potato Sack package which ends up costing $5 more than that hidden discount.

descender wrote on Apr 15, 2011, 13:12:
Where is it cheaper? It's $55/$45 everywhere... and if you buy the potato sack/portal 2 bundle you get portal 2 for $40.

bestbuy.com has the PC version for $35 online, but taxes and shipping probably bump it back up to 40-something.

Looks like an updated and expanded Starscape. Cool!

Quboid wrote on Jan 15, 2011, 20:39:
Hmm. That's unethical. Do they do this a lot? I can accept the occasional screw up but if this is a tactic to trick people into thinking they're getting a discount, that's not cool. I would expect a lot better from Paradox.

I'd assume it's just a mistake or maybe they used the wrong box when correcting the price to its surprising MSRP of $40 (most AAA games are $50 in the US, and it looks like 2011 will be the year of $60 as standard for at least both EA and Activision). Or it could be that they didn't notice the lower-than-usual US prices are standard and mistakenly view it as price matching other stores' "pre-order discounts". It's been listed as "20% off" at $40 for months, at any rate.

I don't think they do it very often, but there's sometimes a mistake or two in their offers list. Some GG games have done the same thing before, appearing as "20% off" for a sale's week, but actually only just being a retailer-wide price-dropped MSRP as a result. In those cases though, they often do go back up to the old pre-price-dropped price after the sale finished. Dawn of Discovery in particular would often appear in their sales last year at the everyday price of everywhere else but advertised as "40% off", and then would pop back up to $20 more than anywhere else after the sale was done. They also often list games at full price in their sales section as "0% off!", but I assume that's because it's on sale in some other region but not the US.

Impulse have a few games and programs that sat in their "on sale" list for almost a year before they redesigned their site, and it sure looked like it was just the result of a price drop that they accidentally entered in as a promotional deal. I think the Corel products have now gotten permanently stuck in their new sales list.

In the US, TDU2's MSRP seems to be $40, at least that's what it is everywhere from Amazon to Steam to Walmart. GG is also selling it for $40, but for some reason mark it as being "discounted" from $50, so it is permanently in their sales list as being 20% off.

Mcboinkens wrote on Jan 15, 2011, 19:50:
Wait, so the second encounter is free for those of us with the first encounter? This is excellent news!

No, the DLC is for the second encounter. It will add the First Encounter's content to the second game, if you already own the first.

Really cool news! I skipped picking this up in GOG's christmas sale, but I think I might need to go grab it now.

Is this the game that GOG.com paid the developers to make a new compatibility patch, which ended up being GOG-exclusive? I seem to recall that being a sore point with folks who bought it elsewhere, so this is a nice resolution.

And it's always great news to hear about a game being open-sourced. Even better insurance of future compatibility and cross-platform support. I look forward to being able to play it in Linux or on a cell phone, probably by next week at the rate they usually port these things.

deadearth wrote on Dec 11, 2010, 10:56:

Techie714 © wrote on Dec 11, 2010, 10:23:
Where are the amazing Steam sales this Christmas? I've been less than impressed with Steam this year so far!

Those are always after christmas, usually starting the day after i think.

A day or two before, last year, the day after the year before that, I think. This year, the Treasure Hunt ends on the 19th, but they require you to login on the 20th to be entered for the Grand Prize. That's presumably when they'll launch the Christmas sale, with so many eyeballs present.

In fact, some people claim they briefly saw the rules state "... be logged into Steam at some time on December 20, 2010 (12:01am PST – 11:59 PM PST), the first day of the Steam Christmas Sale." but I never saw that when I read through them, even on the first day of the treasure hunt.

The entire Arma 2 line (including the DLC) is on sale for 50% off on Steam, making Combined Ops a much better deal than either of the two games alone, it's only $2.50 more to get both.

nin wrote on Nov 1, 2010, 21:00:
Alpha Protocol is $29.99 on Steam.

Pretty much everything Sega published has had permanent price drops on Steam. They even stuck up a special page about it.

Jerykk wrote on Nov 1, 2010, 23:29:
Also, if you enjoyed The Ship, you should give Bloody Good Time a try. Hell, you should try it even if you never played The Ship. Definitely worth a shot at $5.

I agree, it's great fun.

Looks like the pack will be 50% off (regular price will be $25), not 75%. Had me wondering for a minute there, why would a value bundle have to be discounted 75% to save you 60% off the separate prices.

Also looks like the two games will be available individually for 50% off ($10 and $7.50).

In other words, 50% off Lead and Gold or Shattered Horizon, or buy a bundle of both with a special name for 60% off.

I like it. It's an updated, faster playing and more polished sequel to The Ship.

Most of the gamemodes revolve around the idea of everyone being assigned a target, and everyone knowing they've also been assigned as a target to someone else (but with no idea who your hunter is). Then you have to go and kill your target. You're given a mugshot, name (everyone gets a random character name when they join), and location on your HUD, plus a marker on the map, and you need to make the kill without getting caught by security and without messing up and making them aware you're the one hunting them. Also without getting killed by your hunter. You can kill your hunter in self-defense if you figure out who it is, but everyone else is off limits and deducts points from your score if you guess wrong.

So everyone's running around trying to get their specific target, paranoid that everyone else they see is out to get them, and it's a pretty fun idea. You also have to occasionally stop to eat, sleep, and go to the bathroom (and are vulnerable when doing any of these), there are environmental traps to help you kill your target without bloodying your hands, and there's all sort of extra ways to get points like pickpocketing (or killing a pickpocketer), using different weapons depending on how many points they're assigned on a given round, and boasting. Some game modes only give you one target per round, so you have to try to get the most points possible out of the single kill and then spend the rest of the round avoiding getting killed yourself.

Unfortunately they don't mention a word of this in the sales pitch, or any of the trailers, etc., and instead pitch it as a pure deathmatch game with wacky weapons. So some folks are running around just killing anyone in sight, presumably deleting the game in frustration when they discover they're losing (it might even kick players who kill too many "innocents"). It could do with more on-screen admonishment to point out that you've killed the wrong player and only have one valid target. Or a better tutorial than the singleplayer/bot mode with popup hints that you have to push 'G' to dismiss.

It only has three maps, but they seem to be pretty well designed, with plenty of traps and multiple locations, both on sets and behind them. The eight different characters seem to be diverse enough, with a good spread of them being used when I played. The weapons seem to be numerous and are entertaining.

I didn't really notice any big bugs in the couple of hours I've played, aside from a Steam bug that required me to delete my ClientRegistry.blob and reload before I could join any multiplayer servers. It uses the Source engine, so it's pretty solid and doesn't feel like a console port. That said, it's pretty much guaranteed to not get any more content (or even bugfixes) in the future, unless that single remaining cofounder happens to know how to model, texture, map, and program.

I imagine that without strong developer support it won't keep enough players online to stay fun for too long, but right now it's busy and fun and it's only $5.

Dev wrote on Oct 25, 2010, 22:56:
I wish they'd have videos of the games and link each pic on the sale page to the game's page. They look interesting but I'm not sure I want to buy it based on just a few pics. I want to see gameplay.

Yeah, they don't seem to be the best of salesmen. They do have demos, though, which are what you'll need to download if you buy the games anyway. They're all pretty simple and just like the classic arcade games they mention in their description, but they're very slick, graphics and gameplay both, and have some extra stuff like upgrades in the space invaders game, etc.

Puppy Games has a sale on a bundle of their back catalog, Ultratron, Titan Attacks, and Droid Assault, for $4.97. http://www.puppygames.net/blog/?p=654 and the deal is in a pop-up on http://www.puppygames.net/

I commented this in the last On Sale, but only just before it got pushed off the front page.

I think I'm going to be picking up the Eidos collection on Steam, if it's on sale for the holidays for $50-$75 again. So getting Batman now would be a bit of a waste.

A cool sale I just saw in the comments at RPS is Puppy Games' back catalog (Ultratron, Titan Attacks, and Droid Assault) for $4.97. Just the sort of deal I was waiting for, and puppy games have a pretty good system, after you buy the pack all you need to do is download a game's demo and type in your email address and it's automatically registered. Since the demo's always going to be available on a mirror somewhere you don't have to worry about the store's redownload policy.

Kajetan wrote on Oct 3, 2010, 08:09:
They scrapped the downloader after going out of beta. Now it's only a simple download link.

Also, the download servers support multiple connections, resume, etc. So you can use your favourite downloader (I use DownThemAll) to hit the full download speed of your connection (it's hosted on a CDN, so it should be able to handle pretty much anything). Further, all your games are listed on your account's page, and you can re-download anything at any time. The extras are separate links from the installers, so you can skip them or grab only the ones you're interested in, again with resume and multiple connections and re-downloading.

a self-extracting/installing container with no strings attached

It's one of the best installers for a download store I've seen. An integrity check, and then just a single page with the ability to set the installation directory and whether to add icons to the desktop or not.

If the installer is super large it's split into 2GB sections (you just download them all into the same directory and run the first one which is an .exe), which is a bit of a pain but I can understand why it's important to work around problems with some people's setups. The extras are always just .zip files.

The whole system is simple, and works perfectly without requiring any extra software or anything. I really think it's the best example of how a DD store should work. Of course, they don't have to worry about updates to their packages, which simplifies things hugely (and admittedly, the few times they've had to update an installer, it hasn't been done very elegantly).

It's just a shame that they don't view the download service as quite as valuable a part of the site as they should. Even after all the complaints arising from their marketing stunt, they're still saying that having downloads disappear or be deleted again in the future shouldn't bother their customers, since the installers are DRM-free and everyone should have backups. Which is true, but misses the point that it would still suck, and being able to download both now and in the future is a good portion of why I'm paying them money.

But at 50%-off, it's more than worth the money. I'm just not sure why you wouldn't wait for a 50%-off sale on all their games, if you've already waited 5 years to buy it anyway.