DOOMhas a free weekend.
Also Blitzkrieg 3, which I’m kind of excited to check out tomorrow. Downloading it right now.
And I can’t get it to play on either of my (admittedly old) computers, even at the lowest settings. (I think it would be playable if I could get it to 640x480, as I have with other games from that era.) Fortunately, I thought to try out the Demo before activating my Steam code.
So, if you’re reading this after the offer is finished, PM me and I can give you a Steam code. First come, first served. I will post back here when the code is taken. If I haven’t, then the offer is still on the table.
(I unhooked my Steam account, and I still have the code. So I do not think it actually connected it to Steam. I think it just requires a Steam account for verification purposes, to avoid some sort of bot getting tons of free copies.)
Steam has Just Cause 3 free to play for the next 27 hours.
That’s weird. I’ve never seen anything other than a 3-4 day free weekend, not a random 1 day in the middle of the week. Hard to complain about free but at 60gb a lot of people who find out about it later will barely have time to DL it to play.
Actually, it started yesterday and I didn’t notice. 
Guess this means more free FTP during Midweek Madness.
So I see it’s a free weekend for Saint’s Row 4 on Steam. There was a Deep Silver Humble Bundle a few weeks ago. (checks launch dates) Yup, Agents of Mayhem is about to come out…
Deadlight is free at GOG.
And they’re running what is functionally a mystery-box sale.
Shadow Warrior 2013 is free until tomorrow morning. It’s pretty good.
The developers of Darkwood have released it DRM free via BitTorrent on the Pirate Bay. Here’s an article about it from PC Gamer, which includes the link to the Pirate Bay page.
“Sorry! Page not found.”
Anyone ever play it? What’s it like?
Fixed link: Darkwood creators upload the full game to The Pirate Bay so everyone can play it | PC Gamer
Hm. Disappointed I missed this.
Shit, sorry about that guys. Thanks for fixing the Darkwood link Terminus.
I checked it out based on this thread, and ended up paying for it.
I’m about 4 hours in and not bored or frustrated, so there’s that. Had a couple re-starts to get the hang of it. I’m playing on normal difficulty, which I pretty much always do on the first playthrough of anything.
I wouldn’t say it’s ‘scary’, but I’m not one who gets scared. I saw a couple reviews that compared it to some scary movies, but I’m not getting it yet. Yes, the atmosphere is absolutely creepy and weird, though. It’s set up very well. I’m only 4 or 5 nights in though…who knows, I may piss my pants here in an hour or of once I get back to it.
Gameplay is ok, it’s been a long time since I played anything top-down. I haven’t had a chance to get any skills yet. There is a lot of crafting, and I am generally weak when it comes to the crafting aspect of games, but in this game it appears to be necessary to finish at all. So lots of scavenging and crafting. You can also trade.
Graphics are nice enough to look at, there is a neat effect that things farther away are blurry and come in to focus the closer you get. I’m not a graphics aficionado, so it’s good enough for me and for what it is, I think.
Combat is clunky, and there are plenty of reviews that concur. I find myself skipping the primary attack (hold L-Mouse to prep, aim, and click R-Mouse to attack) for the secondary one, which is M-Mouse, just because I can never get swing in with the primary. There is a dodge mechanic which I’m not good at yet, and that might make a difference once I get that down.
There is a day-night cycle, and there’s no way to speed up the night or ‘sleep’ until something happens. So for my few nights so far, I end up sitting there listening to things and occasionally having a dog or a …thing…break in and attack me. I don’t have a problem with this, as it does a great job of building anticipation and pulling you in to the atmosphere. Since you can only see in a cone of where you character is facing, and not what’s going on in the entire screen, you spend a lot of time wondering if that sound was in the next room.
It’s definitely worth free, whether it’s worth $14 probably depends on if that’s your bag or not.
Mirage: Arcane Warrior will be free tomorrow before going to $10.
Mirage is actually really fun. The fact that it flopped was weird and unexpected to me. There were a bunch of butthurt Chivalry players who mastered the exploits of that engine who were butthurt that the new engine fixed that and made the game more fair so they hit it with a massive negative review campaign on day 1. I have to wonder how much influence that had towards having it flop.
Definitely pick it up.
Is it multiplayer only?
The minimum GPU requirements listed on Steam seem to be higher than I would expect for any competitive online game. Going by Passmark scores, it’s higher than even the PS4 Pro. Competive gamers prefer to be able to play well and above the requirements, so they can run at really high framerates.
Granted, we all know the minimum GPU requirements are far above the actual minimum. You can always drop the resolution and other graphics settings, accept lower framerates, and run it on lower hardware. Still, I was surprised at the minimum they chose.
When your previous game was a DX 9 game, it seems a bit too big a leap to get old players onboard. The general eSports minimum is what I think games should target.
Especially since the graphics, given the Steam video, seem so cartoony. You can get away with a lot lower graphic fidelity on cartoony graphics.
That said, I’ve not been checking out the Online FPS genre. Maybe everyone is doing this. But I would try to build close to the current big eSports titles.