Recettear & Chantelise 75% off!

BUY. THEM. NOW.
Not kidding, these two games are too excellent to pass on them!
Both Alkaid and I absolutely love these little gems, they're worth every cent.
And believe me, they're dirt cheap today. You've got over 22 hours to buy them with that discount, so hurry. They won't eat your hard-earned cash without giving you a fantastic experience in return.

Chantelise comes along for 1,99€ / $2.49 while Recettear (which will last longer) costs only 3,74€ / $4.99 today. Yes, fair pricing for european customers, isn't that nice?

Grab the demos of Recettear and Chantelise on their Steam-storepages and try them yourselves!

Both games come with a charming taste of humor and heartwarming scenes, and I can only recommend them as christmas presents for people interested in gaming, no matter how old they might be. They're also fitting gifts for your kids, siblings or cousins.

A note apart from the actual games:
Carpe Fulgur is really doing a great job localizing these games, and there's more to come.
If you appreciate the effort, please spread the word to your friends, family or random strangers on the internet, show them that these games are worth the money and support Carpe Fulgur in their Holy Quest to bring us awesome doujin games to enjoy!

Click the image to visit the game's storepage on steam!

Co-Worker edit: Buy it, it's really great, extremely good/addicting and very old-school!

Trine 2 Launch Trailer!

We're almost there! Only 5 more hours until Trine 2 unlocks on Steam!

Ready your arrows, take up that shield and put on your wizard hat -
it's time for the next chapter of the Trine!

War in the North: Review

The review is finally done! A few days later than I hoped, but earler than I expected.
A few words before you start reading - it isn't a bad game, and certainly not as horrible as I predicted from trailer one onwards.

War in the North is out - or is it?

Well, at least in the USA.
Warner somehow seemed fine with delaying the Game for another 8 to 24 days, depending on the region. Of course, the UK gets to play it last, why wouldn't they?
Retailers already pressured digital distributioners like Steam to hold back Preorders for certain regions, and let's not mention the rising prices of many games by various publishers for Australia, Warner amongst them.

Magicka: The Stars are Left

A grand day for all who love Lovecraft's works, like me, and Magicka!
Cthulhu's gonna arrive soon, spreading mind-entangling madness amongst wizards all around the world!

“more insane than a black goat with a thousand young,”

R'lyeh is calling, just like all the interesting puns Arrowhead already started to use

The Stars are Left includes:

• An all-new adventure, several levels long, allowing players to get lost in space and time
• 2 new challenge maps
• 2 new robes
• 2 new bosses
• 5 new achievements
• 7 new enemies
• Considerably more than 2 new items and Magicks
• Also, we make fun of Minecraft this time

Are you gonna join the magical madness when The Stars are Left launches this winter?




PS: If you want some madness already, pick up Cthulhu Saves the World on Steam - its featured on the Halloween Sale for $2/1,33€!

RAGE - This will Piss People off!

Who would have thought that Bethesda & id Software's new game "RAGE" would actually enrage customers like it actually did since it unlocked tonight via Steam?

Not only did Bethesda show its true colors in the court case against Mojang, but also the most recent game seems to be a magnificent dickmove against customers playing on PCs.

While even the developers themselves admitted it was a huge mistake to start developing for both Consoles and PCs at the same time 6 years ago, they didn't come to realize their mistake early enough, it seems.
Six years ago, both X360 and PS3 were still young, and easily up to par with most PC configurations of the target audience, if not more advanced.
The rise of PCs against the static hardware of consoles was clearly visible to all, yet id didn't rethink their strategies.

Now the damage is done. RAGE has been released in the US and it screams
"I COULD HAVE BEEN SO MUCH MORE IF IT WASN'T FOR MY CONSOLE STEPBROTHERS!" into the World Wide Web.

Humble Frozen Synapse Bundle is live!

The Humble Bundle is a charity-sale of a bunch of indie games of which you might or might not heard of yet.

You decide how much you want to pay and who should receive how much out of it:
Charity or Developers, or do you just want your games?
You can support the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Child's Play, or support the cause by supporting Humble Bundle itself, who provide the bandwidth and development - in fact, they keep the project alive.

Maybe you'll remember the third round and donated already, well, here's your next chance!

What do you get out of it?
Only one game for the time being - Frozen Synapse.
The game normally costs ~$25 (though you get two copies for that).
UPDATE:
Now includes TRAUMA as well!

But let's not forget the wonderful feeling of helping a good cause!

The Games are DRM free and you can download & play them right away, but have also the option to redeem your Humble Bundle on Steam - all games will get unlocked for your account in an instant!

Now now, go and spend some money!

HumbleBundle.com

Steam Weekend Deal: Company of Heroes Franchise

Relic's Company of Heroes-franchise is 80% off this weekend on Steam.
80% discounted? Hell yes! That's 4,99€ in EU areas for the complete series, $9.99 for the US.

Company of Heroes brings a strong narrative onto your PC. World War II hasn't seen a better strategy game ever. The atmosphere is captivating and feels authentic.
The game's RTS mechanics are deep, the cover system is essential, the point-capture-system makes sure the game stays dyncamic rather than having base-rushing like present in Blizzard RTS games.

While the Dawn of War 2 franchise might be more focused on game dynamics due to completely dropping basebuilding, CoH still comes with construction, more ressources, strategic perks and a few more factions, giving you enough freedom to fit into your personal preferences of warfare.


Another great advantage is that all of the 3 games available - Company of Heroes, Opposing Fronts and Tales of Valor - are stand-alone titles.
Owning licenses for all of them unlocks the full package, all game-modes, factions and Campaigns, while all of them share the same multiplayer community, regardless of which games you own.
This means you could buy one of the games right now, play all you want and buy the rest when you got convinced by the game's brilliance.

I'll take the chance to shoot some Krauts today. Care to join me?

New F2P Title on Steam: Rusty Hearts

Rusty Hearts appeared on Steam today, adding another Free to Play title to Steam's range.
The game just opened its Beta phase to everyone and is still in development.

Rusty Hearts is a multiplayer online game with fast-paced and highly-stylized brawling combat combined with a solo or team-based dungeon exploration experience. In this gothic inspired world of vampires, half-vampires, and humans, players will be able to unleash devastating combo attacks, engage in a wide variety of epic monster battles, collect valuable loot, and become a unique hero.

Sounds not too bad, huh? Let's take a closer look!

Magicka Content Update/Sale!

As predicted, the Paradox Week on Steam ends with a huge Magicka sale!
75% off on all titles of the franchise, excluding the newly released "Gamer Pack".

The Gamer Pack comes with three new unique robes, inspired by popular videogames.
That is not all there is to today's Content Update, though, as there are two more robes you get for free!

As a Warhammer-nerd, I am overwhelmed by joy about the new "Space Marine" robe. He's quite strong and endures a lot of punishment before going to the ground. His Bolter does not only sound cool, but the shells explode on impact and set surrounding enemies ablaze!
He can charge with his staff, doing no damage to foes, but getting you out of trouble (or directly into enemy lines to do maximum damage).
Immune to Life, your Marine will need to rely on his Regeneration. Poison is no issue to him, and his Power Armor gives him a fire and cold resistance.
He's vulnerable to Lightning and Arcane, so be careful!

Alkaid is more hyped over the "Tron"-Mage who shoots discs that bounce from enemy to enemy, dealing damage to surrounding foes (or friends) until they vanish. He absorbs Lightning but is immune to Life and Arcane (according to description, Arcane immunity still did damage to my mage when I tried)!
You'll never die when reviving your friends with the Tron mage. If you're wet and try to conjure Lightning, it will immidiately heal you. As you don't need to press anything aside from the A-key to conjure Lightning, you can build up tenthousands of hitpoints healed.

One thing that's true for most of the new robes is that Arrowhead is now playing with even more specific traits for robes.
While the Wizard Hat DLC was purely cosmetic and the Vietnam and Patchwork Wizards had their unique starting loadouts, they've been exact copies of the vanilla wizard, aside from their looks.
The Party Robes pack, introducing Tank, Support and Rogue robes changed that, modifiying speed, hitpoints, resistances and spell strength.
With the new robes we got today, even more things got specifically changed to fit the themes of the robes - which traits these are is up for you to find out.

In case you never heard of Magicka before (which is a shame in itself, considering the successful nine months since release), or just haven't picked up the game yet, fear not!

The COMPLETE Magicka set, excluding the new Gamer Pack, is available for only $6.24/6.24€ today. Go for it, people! Only 19 hours left til this sale ends!

Space Marine and Tron are free for all - do you recognize the Gamer Pack robes?

Learn With Portals

Software/Game Developer Valve shows again that they've got their hearts and heads on the right spots.

"Learn With Portals" is the name of the current project started by Valve, trying to engage children in schools with science, make them use their heads to solve physics puzzles and get a feeling for problem solving.
Bringing the Portal-franchise into schools sure will be a lot of fun for the kids (and teachers)!

Intrigue. Engage. Inspire.

When we heard the buzz surrounding the new role video games are playing in education, we had to throw our hat in the ring. Today, innovative educators are finding ways to incorporate Portal™ and Portal 2 into their classrooms—helping teach physics and critical-thinking skills. It’s eye-opening to see how video games can be used in amazing and unexpected ways to help educate our next generation.

One of the biggest challenges in teaching science, technology, engineering, and math is capturing the students’ imaginations long enough for them to see all of the possibilities that lie ahead.

Using interactive tools like the Portal series to draw them in makes physics, math, logic, spatial reasoning, probability, and problem-solving interesting, cool, and fun which gets us one step closer to our goal—engaged, thoughtful kids!

That, of course, is not all there is to the project!
Until the 20th, the original Portal is gonna be free for all those who don't yet own it anyway.

If you're new to Steam as a platform, you can pick up Portal and get the full feature unlock for free, without having to buy anything. Yet.

Tell your friends, spread the word! Portal is free once again!

First Thoughts on Deus Ex: HR

So, me's grabbed Deus Ex: Human Revolution.
I don't know if it will be worth the buy yet, and I'm not far into the game.

However, I already have some thoughts about the game I'd like to share. Maybe some of you can comment on them to hopefully assure me it'll get better later on.

My first time playing involved dear Alkaid, who'll work with me on a Game-related Project. We're preparing stuff currently, thinks are extremely confusing since neither of us has been working on a team project like that before, and especially the presentation needs to be done well.
More on that soon enough. Important point is I'm directly talking about the game while playing, streaming via skype.

View the Full Post to read my list of thoughts.