Update: In a tweet, Devolver Digital confirmed that this Steam sale is being held in conjunction with charitable speedrunning organization Games Done Quick. Devolver says they'll donate 10 percent of the sale's revenue to GDQ.

GDQ recently kicked off Awesome Games Done Quick 2018, a week-long speedrun marathon dedicated to breaking videogames every way possible and raising money for the Prevent Cancer Foundation. 

Original story:

Publisher Devolver Digital is running a quick Steam sale to ring in the new year. A handful of good indies are on sale through Monday, January 15, including gratuitous violence simulator Hotline Miami and contemplative puzzler The Talos Principle. Here's the full list: 

•  Titan Souls - $4 at 75 percent off 
•  Broforce - $4 at 75 percent off 
•  Serious Sam 3: BFE - $8 at 80 percent off 
•  Serious Sam: The Random Encounter - $1 at 80 percent off 
•  High Hell - $5 at 50 percent off  
•  Omnibus - $3 at 75 percent off 
•  Hotline Miami - $3 at 75 percent off 
•  Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number - $4 at 75 percent off 
•  The Talos Principle - $8 at 80 percent off (the DLC-filled Gold Edition is $11 at 85 percent off) 

You'll also find some good discounts in GOG's New Year's Resolution sale, which started earlier today and runs through January 15. The first day's 'resolutions' (read: recommendations) are mostly meaty RPGs like Divinity: Original Sin 2 and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, and there's a good indie presence thanks to other games like Torchlight and Legend of Grimrock. 

You can't keep a serious man down. You can try: firing out jokes at his ears, hoping he'll crease up in diaphragmatic agony. It won't work, as he's simply too serious. For Serious Sam, it's an understandable affectation likely cultivated from the mass culling of headless bomb-men. And so, rather than leave him to his own devices, a group of fans have gone about retooling his first two adventures. Serious Sam Classics: Revolution is the result, giving Sam advanced graphics shader support, 64-bit compatibility and full Steamworks integration. The game is now available on Steam Early Access, and is free to all owners of both classic games.



"This early access version of the game will give you the game on the improved engine: The First Encounter, The Second Encounter, and a limited number of new versus and survival levels," write the developers on the Early Access page. It's a slightly odd situation given that both games were remastered in the Serious Sam HD releases, but seems like a nice version for fans of the original style.

But if both First and Second encounters are accounted for, why is the game on Early Access. Aside from the bug potential, the developers are also planning the following additional features:


A brand new campaign with new and exciting enemies, environments and a special ending boss!
The beloved Plasmagun and Minelayer from the Warped mod!
Even more new and refined gamemodes!
Even moooooore achievements, and icons for them!
A fully featured scripting engine for advanced mod creation!
More OpenGL shader integration like post processing and more!
More versus maps and fixes to the current ones based on user feedback!
For modders, we'll be adding a set of tutorial maps to showcase the new features we've added to the engine!
Steam Trading Cards!


Serious Sam Classics: Revolution is available now, and free to owners of Serious Sam Classic: The First Encounter and Serious Sam Classic: The Second Encounter.

The latest recipient of the Humble Weekly Sale is Croteam's hyper-realistic military simulation, Serious Sam. For a fistful of dollars, you can get the entire series, including Serious Sam's First and Second Encounters, Serious Sam II, Serious Sam 3: BFE, and the Serious Sam indie series. More seriously, all funds directed towards Croteam are being put towards development of Serious Sam 4.

For more on the contents of the sale, here's an extremely serious video:



So far, the only information we have on Serious Sam 4 is the above image and Croteam's promise that it'll be the "craziest and greatest Serious Sam game EVER." They used all-caps and everything. That's how you know they're serious. Oh god, I'll stop now.

The average price is currently hovering around the $4.25 mark, which is therefore what you'll need to pay to unlock Sams 2 & 3. The bundle runs until Thursday.

Valentine's Day isn't usually synonymous with charging monsters and punch-packing rocket launchers, but that's the direction Indie Royale have taken with their Valentine's Bundle 2.0. Serious Sam 3: BFE headlines the six-game selection. I guess those screaming headless bomb-arm guys really were just trying to give you a hug.

Also included in the bundle is the tower-defence game Shad'O, 2D platformer Oozi: Earth Adventure, 2D platformer Lunnye Devitsy, 2D platformer Wake, and 2D puzzle-platformer Doc Clock and the Toasted Sandwich of Time. If nothing else, it's a love letter to fans of 2D platformers.



As always, the bundle price will fluctuate over the next week - rising as more people buy, but lowering in response to generous donations. The current minimum is £3.72, which isn't bad for the tender company of viscera-chasing demons.

In a post on this Steam forum thread about a new Serious Sam 3 patch, Croteam's CTO Alen Ladavac has spoken out against Microsoft's latest Windows revision, describing the Metro/tiled UI's Windows Store restrictions as a "horrible" idea, and blasting the certification process currently being used to keep certain mature games off the Store.

After the dreaded 'W' and, er, '8' words were brought up in the thread - specifically in regards to problems a player was having running Serious Sam 3 in Windows 8 - Ladavac responded by expressing his concerns about the service, after apologising for "keeping off topic". His biggest complaint was that "one cannot release a tiled UI application by any other means, but only through Windows Store," referring to the interface-formally-known-as-Metro's disregard for any program/game that doesn't meet their strict requirements. To clarify: Windows 8 itself won't restrict you from installing certain games/programs, they just won't show up in its primary interface.

Ladavac took exception to this, stating that "if it was just about 'being downloaded from Windows store', it would not be a problem. It would be nice to have a common hub to download things from. But to get an app onto that store, it has to be certified by MS. This means bringing the 'console experience' onto your desktop. Each app that you will get through the Windows Store will have to adhere to certain requirements imposed by MS." He went on to shake his fist at the age restrictions that have kept games like Dishonored and Skyrim off the Windows Store, at least in the short term.

Thankfully, that policy has been reversed by Microsoft, although it's worth noting that the Windows 8 app certification requirements still state that any applications "with a rating over PEGI 16, ESRB MATURE, or that contain content that would warrant such a rating, are not allowed." In any case, the games haven't appeared on the store yet.

The suggestion that a hypothetical Windows 9 may block off side-loading entirely (loading programs outside of the tiled UI) is entirely speculative, but much of what Ladavac says chimes with what other outspoken developers, and Valve, have been saying for months now. As PCGamesN explained earlier today, they've been putting their considerable weight behind Linux instead, the beta of which opened just last week.

The problem with Serious Sam 3's rocket launcher is that it looks too much like a rocket launcher, rather than, say, a disconcertingly headless enemy that fits in the palm of your hand like a particularly grisly Polly Pocket. Thank heavens then for the Pet Scrapjack mod, and for Steam Workshop in general, which has welcomed Serious Sam 3 into its moddable embrace.

Highlights so far include the aforementioned Scrapjack, the gentlemanly Sir Buttersworth mod, and, er, a map based on the Ben Stiller film Night at the Museum. If that's inspired you to make your own, based on Meet the Parents or even There's Something About Mary, Croteam have helpfully created a guide to putting the thing online. In the meantime, this cheery little headless fella clearly needs to be in everyone's game. Chop chop.

http://youtu.be/e91q5BtlxK0

The video above shows off Croteam's ingenious DRM solution for Serious Sam 3: BFE. It's got nothing to do with secure-ROM, or product codes, or online validation. Instead, those who boot a pirated version of the game will find themselves hounded forever by a gigantic pink scorpion that can never be killed. The video above comes from RPS, who scooped it from DSO, and shows the terrifying thing in action. It might well be the most inventive DRM trick since Rocksteady coded Batman to forget how to glide in pirated versions of Arkham Asylum.

http://youtu.be/MRrvZD_VImQ

In a refreshing change to developers moaning about piracy levels on the PC, Serious Sam publisher Devolver Digital have given the platform a big bigging up. The company’s chief financial officer, Fork Parker, tweeted: “people will pay for awesome.”

Destructoid asked Parker for more comments, and he followed up with: "Piracy is a problem and there is no denying that but the success of games like Skyrim and our own Serious Sam 3 on PC illustrates that there is clearly a market willing to pay for PC games.”

As ever, it’s Valve’s Steam service - among others - that gets all the credit for reinvigorating the market. “In games,we have amazing PC digital download services like Steam, Get Games and Direct2Drive doing the same thing for games that iTunes did for music,” said Parker. “Offer the consumer a variety of great digital content at a reasonable price and the majority will happily pay for the games that suit their tastes.”

The bonkers shooter has had a peak of 1,815 players on Steam today, and is currently sitting at 38th in the Steam charts. But we reckon its nichey appeal, Steam’s ongoing epic sale and a little game known as Skyrim might have something to do with its low popularity.

 
Serious Sam 3: BFE will make a Big Fancy Entrance in four hours time. Croteam have broken recent trends by releasing a launch trailer on the day their game actually comes out, which is nice, and the video does a good job of showing just how serious Sam is about this one. He even does a swear, before obliterating a hundred monsters in slow motion with a rocket launcher. It looks like bloody good fun. There's still time to pre-order it on Steam and Direct2Drive at 10% off.

 
Serious Sam 3: Big Frigid Elephant was originally due to bring its old school big-guns-'n-a-million-monsters formula to our machines mid October. We'll have to wait a little longer, according to a message sent over from the devs. Serious Sam 3: Bouncing Fretful Elevator will now come out on November 22, and is available to pre-order with a 10% discount from Steam. "Chief creative guy" at Croteam, Davor Hunski explains that "the team wants to take a little extra time to make it perfect for Serious Sam fans worldwide.”

“The game is playing wonderfully and looks great so we are going through to balance the difficulty and fine tune the code to eliminate any technical issues at launch. And we’ll probably add some more enemies to the hordes to blow your mind,” he adds.

Sounds good. We look forward to trying out the 16 player co-op mode and blasting enormous enemies when Serious Sam 3: Bentley Fallout Extreme is released in ten weeks. But seriously, what does the BFE stand for? Croteam still haven't said.