The Indie Royale – The Valentines Bundle 2.0
The Indie Royale have now released The Valentines Bundle 2.0, containing six games, four soundtracks, a wallpaper and an album.
Indie Royale – The Serious Sam Lightning Pack
Indie Royale‘s first Lightning Round brings us a bundle of Serious Sam themed indies, containing Serious Sam: The Random Encounter, Serious Sam Double D, Serious Sam: Kamikaze Attack, and Serious Sam: The First & Second Encounter. The bonus game is Serious Sam: The Greek Encounter, a top-down, 8 bit version of the game.
This bundle is on sale for just 100 hours, on the same pay what you want scheme all the previous sales have used.
The Serious Sam Indie Series was commissioned by Devolver Digital with the support of Croteam around the release of Serious Sam 3: BFE. More information on the pack is available here.
Christmas in Cairo.. Seriously!
Croteam‘s Serious Sam: BFE was half-price in the Steam Sales, so I got copies for Tim and myself, along with a copy of Serious Sam: The Second Encounter which was on for less than £2.
One of Steam’s Great Gift Pile objectives was to decorate the Christmas tree in the first level of the game: the achievement Christmas in Cairo, so the game got bumped on the playlist while I’m trying to get some of the objectives completed.
I expected Serious Sam: BFE to be much the same as the previous games in the series.. over the top shooting with lots of guns, more than enough ammo and silly numbers of enemies. I didn’t expect it to look quite so good, though!
Doing my usual climbing around on stuff, I found some Parkour secrets. Nothing huge.. a bit of extra ammo or armour.. a few extra enemy encounters, such as the two Kleers I met in a small alleyway. I’ve played through the first level twice now, specifically looking for secret areas on the second run and even then, I didn’t find them all.
There’s a nod back to a previous Sam, with a single Kamikaze running at you, then Sam screaming back after he’s dealt with, then even more Kamikazes appearing..
I reloaded my save to get an extra couple of turns at this section.. one shot stalls the Kamikaze, with the second finishing him off, and you can get a nice Chain Explosion if you make him blow up his friends 😉
Decorating the tree turned out to be one of the last things to do on the level.. and when I got there, I realised I had to go back a little bit to collect some of the decorations. I’d killed all the Rocketeers out in the open, clearing the area before running through to the museum. However.. Christmas! 🙂
Coal Collector!
The Great Gift Pile objectives are turning out to be a mix of quick and easy tasks and longer, more difficult challenges..
Atom Zombie Smasher: KringleJammer was fairly easy to get, as was the Rock of Ages: Snowball War. Audiosurf: Candy Stripe required only the collection of red and white blocks in a line, but it took me a while to find something on my PC that played at the right pace to generate the blocks I wanted. “Still Alive” was giving me blue blocks, so wouldn’t do for this!
Beat Hazard: Survive Christmas 10 required me to survive for 10 minutes.. and it took far longer than that! After several attempts of under five minutes each, I realised I had unlocked some perks which might help: the Ultra DLC added Micro Missiles and a Reflect Shield which just about let me last long enough to complete the objective.
A harder achievement was the deliberate loss of a game in Fate of the World, where instead of trying to save the world, I led it towards global thermonuclear war and the Let it Glow achievement! After a few attempts I ended up consulting the internet for tips on how to get the ‘right’ ending.. it turned out to be a rather tight list of instructions while hoping for the right random numbers to be generated each turn. I think actually winning this game, as opposed to playing for an achievement, will be next to impossible as all territories seem to get annoyed with you very quickly! 😀
For another deliberate loss, I also tried to nuke Santa in DEFCON.. but found his movements too unpredictable, the AI too eager to react, and my supply of nukes too low for me to get him. I quickly got bored of this, so I checked out the tips on the net again, and reduced the number of cities to 5 per territory, but then found the game crashing almost as soon as I launched a nuke! Something to do with the latest update and Windows 7 🙁
Another not-quite-game objective was Winter Assault.. survive a 30 minute match on Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II – Retribution, on one of the winter maps. Four of us joined the game, with one going AFK immediately.. only interested in the achievement itself.. but three of us met in the middle to trade blows until we’d met our time requirement! I wished for more Great Unclean Ones, but settled for a squad of Chaos Dreadnoughts instead 😀
With the completion of all these objectives, I’m collecting lots of coal along with vouchers which probably won’t get used.. two are for Valve.. I already own all their games, as do all my gaming friends. Although, if anyone does want them.. 🙂
I did win one game via the giveaway.. Silent Dreams’ Grotesque Tactics: Evil Heroes, a fantasy role-playing game with strategic combat and a sense of humour. The games in this giveaway are provided as a token, which can be added to your own inventory or traded.. so if you already own the game you win, you can give it away or trade it for something else.
A friend bought me Space Pirates and Zombies by Minmax Games, which I tried briefly last night. After stumbling through the first couple of missions, I decided I need to be somewhat alert to play! 🙂
The Steam sales are ongoing, and I also picked up ACE Team‘s rather Monty Python-esque Rock of Ages, mentioned earlier, and Croteam‘s Serious Sam HD: The Second Encounter, and Serious Sam 3: BFE, with the first two games below £2 each, and Serious Sam 3 at a reasonable price, considering I wanted a copy for me and a copy for Tim.
Other women spend their money on shoes: I spend my money on games! 🙂
The Little Big Bunch
The latest in the line of indie bundles arrived today: the Little Big Bunch, with five indie games on the usual pay what you want scheme, with money being split between developers and Games Aid as you wish.
This one has a minimum price.. something I’m glad of after seeing a guy taunting one of the indie devs on Twitter this afternoon. He was bragging about only having paid 1 cent for the game.. less than a penny.. which would have been bad enough without the taunting!
I already owned one of the games: Mode 7‘s strategy game Frozen Synapse, so this one is going to Tim, and maybe we’ll get to play together at some point 😉
Also in the bundle are two platformers, one with destruction: Explodemon, by Curve Studios, and one with aliens: Oddworld: Munch’s Oddysee. Finally there’s New Star Soccer 5, a football career sim, by New Star Games.. which isn’t really my type of game. The one I’m most interested in here is 2d platform shooter Serious Sam Double D, from Mommy’s Best Games, and supported by Croteam through their Serious Sam Indie series.
Serious Sam Double D is via Steam code, while the rest of the games are available via Get Games‘ download system. I have to say I much prefer Steam, knowing that I can download the games as many times as I want, and that updates will be applied as they appear. Get Games’ FAQ says that the number of activations per game vary between publishers.. while I don’t mind if I lose a cheap indie game after a couple of reinstalls, I’d be wary of buying anything I forsee playing over and over again.