Competitions and Presents!

What’s better than games?  Free games!  Having seen a large number of Christmas competitions out at the moment, I decided that I may as well try to win some games and spare my bank balance the pain..

So last weekend, I won a copy of the beautiful Trine from a competition on Splitkick.com!  Since I had a copy, the guys kindly let me give it to a friend.. although this turned into a comedy of errors as he told me the wrong email and only realised after I’d told them.. but one more email later, he got the game 🙂

Oh, and I’ve completed Trine too!  I loved the last level, with the continually rising lava, and the evil ghostly figure trying to stop us.  There was also a bonus level, which was another mad dash to escape rising lava, but with purple vials to collect on the way.

Developers Frozenbyte have also now released Trine 2, and I found a few competitions for the game, and told friends to enter too.  One of these involved writing a short story.. and I was surprised to find it really hard to come up with something, and how self-conscious I felt writing it and sending it in.  I realised that I’m even more fussy about my writing than I am about my drawing!

My friend was lucky enough to win one of the competitions for Trine 2.. so he now has both games.. and through DR Gaming‘s 12 Days of Christmas giveaway on Facebook, I won a copy of EA’s Alice: Madness Returns for the 360.. awesome stuff as both Tim and I have wanted this since the teaser trailers came out over a year ago!

Valve have been running a Daily Wishlist Giveaway on Steam over the last week, where a winner each day will get the contents of their Wishlist.  They’ve also had some great offers on, and two friends gifted me games as they came up: Robot Entertainment‘s fortress defence Orcs Must Die and DLC, and Bastion, an RPG by Supergiant Games!

I’ve been playing through Orcs Must Die, and discovered some of the new weapons and traps.. the Fire Bracers allow me to throw fireballs, and are therefore automatically awesome, although I run out of mana rather quickly.. and the Pounder, a ceiling-mounted trap, crushes the orcs with such finality that I can’t not love it! 🙂

I was also pleasantly surprised by the introduction of the Weavers, which add optional talent trees to the game, either strengthening the War Mage or the traps and Guardians.  I love the fact you can choose these at the beginning of each level, so you can change how you play each time 🙂

Steam Summer Camp Sale

After an amazing week away in Madeira, I returned to find Steam has yet another crazy sale going on, with lots of games at very low prices.  Should I fear for my bank balance now?

Friends have bought me a few games: Star Wars – Battlefront II, SpaceChem and my own copy of Oblivion 🙂

I’ve added to this with two tower defense style game: Sanctum and Atom Zombie Smasher, as well as a rather large bundle of Paradox Interactive games.  The Paradox Fantasy Pack got my interest because of Majesty 2, which I tried a long while back.. along with DLC for this plus the original game, it also contains a strategy game called Elven Legacy, plus follow-ups.  As Majesty 2 itself cost £5.35, and the bundle £5.89, this was pretty much a no-brainer!

Along with the Summer Camp Sale, there are a large number of “Camp Activities”, which basically amount to earning specific achievements in a variety of games to earn tickets which allow you entry into the Grand Prize Giveaway, where 100 people will win the top 10 games on their wishlist.  The tickets can also be spent on random in-game content, including map packs, extra characters, missions or vanity gear such as the Sunny Shades for TF2.  I’m only now up to 7 tickets, with a good number of achievements to get.. the HOARD one in particular is eluding me!

As for TF2.. this game has now become free, which has meant a lot more people playing!  We now even have somewhere good to play, as Jason set up his Closed on Sundays TF2 server, complete with silly Roll the Dice mod 😉
So far, the server has filled up quickly whenever we’ve played, which has meant a few good games.  Roll on the weekend!