Great prices to be had.. First there’s the Indie Royale Xmas Bundle which lets you pay what you want for a bunch of games, DRM free, with Steam/Desura keys when available. Really no downside! Always had smooth transactions with them since they’re started.

New comer to the ‘Indie bundle’ trend, Indie Gala, is also offering a neat bundle with a price tag of your choice. Like the humble and royale guys, part of the proceeds go to charity, for that warm and fuzzy feeling. They would work on a better logo, but let’s give them time

Then there’s GOG, Good Old Games, cutting prices by 50% on a lot of stuff. Old classics, lots of goodies included (wallpapers, mp3s, etc) most of the time. All bundled to work great on a recent OS/machine.

And it goes without saying, you might to keep in mind that Steam will most probably have another huge sale during the holidays.. poor, poor wallet! But it has really been a great year for cheap gamers.. or addicts on a budget like me.

If you’re a fellow Canuck with a Twitter account, you could do worse than follow @GameDealsCanada – great way to keep up on offers everywhere.

This one can be bought really cheap – I snagged it at 15$CAN last month, and it even went on sale on PSN for 10$ recently. I’m two levels in (completed with an S grade) and so far it is a HD version of the first title on the Wii, which is not saying it is a bad thing.

You, again, have to save the city from morosity by painting it over while freeing captive citizens and battling the forces of INKT. This time around there’s more power-ups letting you for example power dash heavy objects or automatically pick the right color to apply to buildings. The trees still need to be reanimated and propaganda posters redone as side objectives in each part of the city.

Really colourful and fun. Jumping with a button press is smoother than making a motion with the Wiimote (I don’t have the Move to experiment with its support) but I don’t remember fiddling that much with the camera in the original, especially to look up searching for collectibles.

I’m still waiting to see if the difficulty ramps up annoyingly quick in the last third like the original, or if the upgrade system helps this somewhat. I also have yet to ask my gf to control the robot to test out the limited coop mode..

Great start, looking forward to playing it again. Looks like a perfect palette cleanser between more hardcore stuff.

I try to stay spoiler free, but since this is now a Great Hits title it is old and well known enough that some might slip..

I’ve been obsessed with this for the last three weeks. I’m only missing 6 trophies out of 50, and it’s been responsible for a few ‘Oh shit it’s 2am already ??’. A buddy of mine is responsible, telling me simply that I _needed_ this. I suspect he mostly wanted a Coop partner for the platinum, but he was right !

I have not played the original DR on Xbox.. Reading about it and learning about the time limits was a major turnoff. Demos were not as available back then, and there was the whole HD/SD TV font fiasco, so I let it slide. I did buy Case Zero on XBLA, and that was tons of fun. I think it also helped that I thought Frank West looked annoying, and Chuck Greene looked more apt at surviving a zombie infestation.

Long story short: Chuck Green’s wife has been killed in the Vegas outbreak, and his daughter Katey has been bitten and now needs a shot of Zombrex each 24h to prevent her from turning into a Zombie. Chuck is a participant in a zombie-killing TV show in Fortune City (which is basically a Vegas wannabe city) to finance the Zombrex. Someone lets the zombies out of their pens, bringing an outbreak to the city, and the whole thing is pinned on Chuck. He now has about 72 hours to find out who did it to clear his name, while keeping his daughter safe and when possible rescue survivors he can find.

The 72 hours is really a schedule, not a hard limit; if/when you die (or fail the critical missions or Katey’s doses) you can start the storyline from the beginning but you get to keep your level, combo cards, special moves and vehicule keys. Technically you failed, but you probably still made progress that will help you next time around. I think I might have restarted from the beginning maybe 8 or 9 times total. Not bad. Planning ahead helps, it is better to decide on a grinding or a story related run instead of kinda doing both badly..

The items, weapons, outfits and the combo weapons are really fun.. that made all the ‘use all melee/ranged/explosive/firearm wepons on zombies’ trophies enjoyable. Finding hidden stuff in the city was fun. The Psychos are really messed up, and will totally destroy you during your first attempts while you’re low level — making it even more satisfying when you finally kick their asses later. I did get the DLC suits, which made the game easier, but for 4$ I consider it a rather good buy.

I was so into it that I took the info from a wiki site to make a visual aid to plan on survivor rescues: it’s on Google Docs.

I’m giving it a solid 9/10.

What’s left for me to do: redo all cases in Coop mode, kill 72,000 zombies in one run, and get better at the ‘online’ mode, which is a series of minigames in the TV show refereced at the beginning of the game.. It gives you cash to use in the rest of the game, but I don’t need it anymore. Yup, I’m a trophy addict.

Right now I’m reading that ‘Dead Rising 2: Off the Record’ is an alternate version of the story of DR2 using Frank West instead of Chuck Greene, with some added areas and stuff changed around, but.. meh. Too similar imho. They should have worked on a whole new title instead of a v2.5.

Fun adventure game, easy-to-medium puzzles (with a hint system if you get stuck). The quirk is that your character is a russian stacking doll, going after the 1930s-style Baron to save his family members. Really, really charming. You can stack into dolls that are slightly bigger than you, and then can use their abilities.

So people will complain that it is short.. If you only hit the main plot points and puzzles it’ll be over before ou can blink an eye for sure – you really need to hunt down all the dolls, alternate puzzle solutions and hijinx possibilities to make it last. I finished this 100% in 3 sittings.

1200 MSP on XBLA (some will find it pricey — anybody paying for PSN+ on their PS3 can get it for free this month I hear). 9/10 for the originality charm and humour. I want more, either DLC or a whole new title (Yeah I’m a Double Fine / Tim Schaffer fan). Make more use of combos.

Lots, and lots, and loooots of deals to be had online (Steam, GoG, etc) during the holiday season. XMas also brought 4 new Wii titles on the shelf. So I’ve been busy. For the last couple of weeks it’s been a lot of Morrowind on the PC (2$!). I’m clocking at almost 50 hours so far and having a blast. A lot of grinding to boost my specs up, and I’m starting to complete a lot more quests. I’ll probably get back to blogging about this one.

Last night I’ve completed Tales of Monkey Island Chapter 2: The Siege of Spinner Cay, on WiiWare. I’m a fan of the series, and I’m having a lot of fun with this recent incarnation. Light, colorful, fun. Thumbs up! I have yet to buy the 3 other chapters which have since become available, maybe I’ll ask for Nintendo point cards for my upcoming birthday in March.

Guybrush Threepwood

Fearsome beast

The stat card included with the mini is way above anything I’ll probably see in my gamer career (we tend to be stuck forever at level 1-3) but it’s still really badass.

I do have the BeatMania US release with the controller (was like 20$ at FutureShop) but I must say I really suck at this one. I was at least getting somewhere with Guitar Freaks, and wasn’t half bad at DDR..

I love dual videos with the screen and the hands at the same time:

Why not use both controllers?

Shamelessly stolen from commenters on Kotaku.

And another, more hi-res video on IGN.

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