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Oblivion GOTY Edition $18 on Direct2Drive

Steam isn’t the only option for online content distribution. Who can forget about Direct2Drive, which offers some pretty good deals like today’s The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Deluxe Game of the Year Edition for $17.95. The deluxe version of the GOTY edition includes a bunch of DLC in the purchase, including:

• Horse Armor Pack (DLC1)
• Orrey (DLC2)
• Wizard’s Tower (DLC3)
• Spell Tomes (DLC4)
• The Vile Lair (DLC5)
• The Thieves Den (DLC7)
• Mehrunes Razor (DLC9)

If you haven’t checked this blockbuster out already, now there is no excuse. Unless, of course, your computer doesn’t meet the system requirements. If role-playing-games aren’t your thing but deals are, GRID is 50% off on Steam for the weekend.

Read (Direct2Drive)

BioShock and Oblivion bundled together

It seems like an unlikely match, but nevertheless, 2K Games, publisher of both BioShock and Oblivion, has announced that it’s combining the two games in a bundle.

The new bundle will be released on July 7 on PC for $30 and on Xbox 360 for $40. A good value if you haven’t tried either game, which are both classics.

Oblivion, Morrowind and Call of Cthulhu hit Steam

Add this announcement to the horribly kept secrets bin — Recently made official by a product listing put up by Steam is the fact that Bethesda games such as Oblivion, Morrowind and Call of Cthulhu have made their way onto the service.

If you haven’t already played through both Elder Scrolls games now is a perfect chance as Steam is offering a Deluxe Edition of Oblivion which includes pretty much all DLC currently out for the game for just $19.99. Additionally, Morrowind will be offered for just $11.19; hell, why not by both together for $28.19.

This isn’t just Bethesda’s back catalog however, as Rogue Warrior (one of the studio’s newer titles) seems to have also made the cut with the product listing announcing its September 2009 availability.

Bethesda’s Morrowind and Oblivion coming to Steam?

If the above image is anything to go by the guys over at Steam seem to have uploaded said image clearly displaying Bethesda’s Morrowind and Oblivion before they were announced to hit the service.

The ad was displayed on the homepage for a brief period of time before it was taken down. However, you can still view the ad to verify its legitimacy here, which is clearly located on the Steam’s servers.

I think its safe to say that both of these games will in fact be hitting the service at some point in the very near future. I mean, Bethesda’s Fallout 3 is available from Steam, why not some of their back catalog too?

Read (Gamerlimit)

Two Worlds Game Review – In Celebration of What Might Have Been

Oh, what might have been.

I too remember the hype machine that surrounded Two Worlds.  I remember how they swore up and  down that it was “Oblivion on steroids”.  And I remember getting my hands on it, slapping it in  my 360, clearing my schedule and preparing for the glee that would surely follow.

And oh, do I remember my profound disappointment.

Oh, do I remember.

The plot is not even vaguely worthy of the title “Oblivion on steroids”–basically, the Orc god of war is dead, and they desperately want him back.  The only problem is, no one knows where  exactly the Orc god of war was buried, and this is probably a good thing as no one but the Orcs
wants this psycho back and operating.  But, sure enough, a Dwarven archaelogical expedition digs
up what appears to be the tomb of His Godly Insanity and the Orcs smell an opportunity.

You, meanwhile, will pick up the thread of this adventure WELL on its periphery and instead be out looking for your sister, who you have haven’t seen since her settlement was attacked fully three years prior.  Seems she’s been kidnapped by another group who ALSO wants to find the Tomb of Aziraal—the Orc god of war—and you’ll have to seek out that tomb before the Orcs do to get your sister back.

There’s plenty to like about Two Worlds.  This is a strange thing to say about a game so incredibly maligned but I’ve got at least half a feeling that most of the ill will from this game came from the damage its own hype machine did.  The gameplay is fairly fun, the story is fairly broad, the graphics and sound quality are at least fair…but this is not what we were promised.  What we were promised was an experience that would make Oblivion look like a sick old woman and we were certainly not provided with that.

However, what we WERE provided with was a halfway decent, if a little buggy, game that had a lot going for it.  It’s true that the game itself is solid if a bit unpolished.  Some reports suggest that the game was actually supposed to be significantly larger, but was broken up into smaller pieces so that there could be downloadable content.  This was in retrospect a bad move—they should have left it as-is and then added on content later if they wanted.  Then they would have had an incredibly huge game and people would’ve been able to stack it up against Oblivion like the hype machine demanded in the first place.

One thing that’s really interesting—though it doesn’t up the quality of the game much—is the fact that Two Worlds’ map is about twenty five percent larger than that of Oblivion.  Thus, if you want to get technical about it, you CAN say with some accuracy that Two Worlds is a much bigger game than Oblivion.   I don’t know if this holds when you start applying the downloadable content—Sheogorath’s little looney bin was a pretty chunky addition—but still, it’s an interesting aside.

But all things considered, Two Worlds isn’t as bad as everyone lets on.  It’s a grave disappointment, sure, but that’s just because the hype machine got seriously overexcited with this one and didn’t bother to check its claims.  You’ll still have plenty of fun with it, especially if you’re one of those hardy souls that, like me, are just champing at the bit for Elder Scrolls Five.  Or possibly Fallout Four, whichever.

Fallout 3–Quite Possibly The Best Game Ever.

I know hyperbole like that is bound to get me in trouble.  Any kind of hyperbole requires a whole lot of backup, otherwise its utterer comes off looking like a rabble-rouser, pointless fanboy, or, worst of all, a politician.

As someone who becomes more convinced with every passing title that Bethesda cannot turn out a BAD game (let’s not bring horse armor into this), Fallout 3 for me rapidly proved to be a whole lot more than “Oblivion with Guns”, as the skeptics protest.

Fallout 3, in case you don’t know, puts you several decades into the future–somewhere around the 2200s–and smack in the middle of a heavily nuked Washington DC and environs, now referred to as the Capital Wasteland.  Filled with mutants, Super Mutants, random thugs known as Raiders, and a whole slew of other baddies, you roam the land, doing good or ill as you see fit, helping the survivors to reclaim forgotten civilization or trashing it all for your own personal profit.  Either way.

With features like the oft-maligned VATS system allowing you to target specific body parts of your attackers and the multi-function Pip Boy on your wrist, Fallout 3 gives you an extraordinarily immersive game with a vast array of downloadables on the way.  In fact, one such downloadable, Operation: Anchorage, has already been covered here.

Oh, sure…it’s not perfect.  The game has the nerve to actually cut you off after beating the main quest instead of allowing you to continue, and you’d think that Bethesda learned enough from Oblivion to just let Fallout 3 work similarly.  And indeed, overuse of the VATS system can make the game a lot duller than it could be.  But I remind those reading that the VATS system is totally optional, and not necessary for gameplay.  Indeed, there’s a lot to be said for the fun of plinking Raiders with a sniper rifle from up on a cliff, and you can’t do that in VATS mode.

But these fairly small troubles aside, Fallout 3 remains a highly immersive experience with lots of great plot and plenty of fun things to do and see.  Try the Lincoln Memorial sometime–it’s still there.  Just watch out for the fifty pounds of irony waiting inside; a bunch of slavers live there now.