‘Tis the season for game bundling, money-money-money. We’ve got good games a-plenty, ka-ka-ka-ka-ching-ka-ching. *ahem* With both the United Kingdoms and the United States celebrating various holidays on Monday, it seems like an excellent time to put diversions within easy reach. The Bargain Bucket usually squints appraisingly at individual deals, but it feels like a time to poke at the bigger, badder things on the discount market right now. (Enjoy dosbox’s plushie! And send me new ones!)

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The Creative Assembly are clever to tap into that Awake-At-4am-Watching-Deadliest-Warrior market; their free-to-play 10v10 strategy game Total War: Arena [official site] looks the next best thing to my nights contemplating whether John Cena could win against a ninja.

The first in-game trailer has arrived ahead of a livestreamed event this afternoon where The Creative Assembly will show off the first live gameplay as community members throw down, with a commentator and a few developers as the icing on this Twitch cake.

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Monday is a holiday in the green and pleasant land the RPS rocketship crashed into. While we won’t be pumping out posts then, we do have a little lined up to tide you over.

Me, I’m excited that this will give me enough free time to finally start on The Witcher 3. I managed to squeeze Episode 3 of Life Is Strange into an evening (oh my gosh it is so good – I think we’ll be talking more about this soon) but my game time has been a bit limited lately. So it’ll be Monsterhunting Monday for me.

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It takes a very special something to make me excited about a pinball game. I played Pokemon Pinball to death, way back when, but very few pinball games since have really captured my attention. Until now. Until the Aperture Science Heuristic Portal Pinball Device. It s a Portal themed table for Zen Pinball [official site] and it looks fantastic. See for yourself in the trailer below the cut.

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To commemorate the digital release of classic Lucasarts games X-Wing and TIE Fighter [Steam or GOG for the best versions here and here], we commissioned Rob Zacny to take a trip down memory lane and into the laser-singed spaces between the stars. He came back with extensive thoughts as to the quality of the games, and their place in Star Wars lore and legend.>

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Blizzard are jolly good at observing trends in games, noting what other developers are doing, then reworking existing ideas to repackage into a polished and accessible game of their own. EverQuest and other MMORPGs became World of Warcraft, Hearthstone riffs heavily on Magic: The Gathering, Heroes of the Storm is one of the few interesting League of Legends/Dota-inspired doodads, and Overwatch [official site]… hm. I’m not sure Overwatch is working out so well.

More long gameplay videos showing complete rounds are arriving, and the more I see, the more I think Overwatch looks like an iffy attempt to combine MOBAs and Valve’s Team Fortress 2.

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I have a soft spot for Carmageddon and I fear that the Kickstarted Reincarnation [official site] is going to steamroll over that soft spot and turn it into a gloopy red mess at the side of the road. After a prolonged stint as an Early Access title, Stainless Games’ rebooted Deathracer launched yesterday. I’ve only played briefly – although I spent a few hours with earlier versions – and while I’m not hindered by the performance issues that continue to affect many, Reincarnation hasn’t reignited my love for the series. Maybe my tastes have changed since my teenage years and maybe Carmageddon hasn’t changed enough.

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NEON STRUCT is a first-person stealth game from the makers of the excellent Eldritch. You play as a federal agent who falls foul of high-level conspiracy when an apparently routine mission goes wrong. It’s out now.>

It might have lacked much of what made later stages of Ion Storm’s game so beloved, but first level Liberty Island was also the freeform Deus Ex promise writ largest: a wide-open playground for action and most especially evasion. While what followed introduced more ways to kill, people to talk to, secrets to find and decisions to agonise over, it downscaled the sandbox, live by your wits promise. What if Deus Ex had been like Liberty Island throughout?

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If you want everything explained to you in a game, [encrypted] [official site] is probably not for you. Roguelikes have traditionally been a genre rife with curiosity and uncertainty, but that’s faded somewhat in modern roguelikes and roguelikelikes. [encrypted] won’t even let you read its text unless you do a little code-cracking, yet is intended to be intuitive for the curious.

It’ll launch on Saturday, May 30th, developer Niall Moody announced today. Come have a look.

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Previously released on itch.io, puzzle game Loop arrives on Steam today. I’ve been creating order from chaos, to tell you wot I think.>

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