[NSFW] Poor Player’s Paradise

Since the last “Poor Player’s Paradise,” the sun has come out and the first day of summer is just a few weeks away. So, how best to celebrate this? Easy: stay the hell inside your house. It’s hot out—too hot to go screwing around outdoors like some kind of sweaty jackass. Your friends may laugh at you for “wasting” your summer sitting inside playing videogames while they lay out in the sun and get tans, but we’ll see who’s laughing when all of your friends die of skin cancer.

Actually, probably nobody would be laughing. That would just be sad. I mean, your friends would all be dead, and their families—man, their families would just be devast–

OK, fine; just forget I even brought it up. I’m trying to say that cheap videogames would be nice this summer, is all. Jeez.

Deal-Seekers (Over $20)

Unless that Professor Layton Meets Phoenix Wright game is released in English sometime this year, Portal 2 is a pretty solid contender to be GameCola’s 2011 Game of the Year. It’s a stellar sequel to what is, apparently, GameCola’s favorite game ever, and it’s already been reviewed here with a fine score.

It’s barely over a month old and already has dropped $20 from its release price. Granted, that price may be a bit high for a “Poor Player’s Paradise” game, but if you’re going to drop $40 on a game you might as well shoot for the moon and drop it on the best—an amazing AAA game with excellent single-player and co-op campaigns.

Cheapskates (Under $20)

It’s a well-known GameCola law that all writers have to publish one big gushy handjob of an article about Telltale Games per month, so, naturally, I was scooped on this one by our own Nathaniel “Hoover Dam” Hoover in his effort to meet this rigorously enforced quota.

Though we may talk about Telltale pretty often around here, this sale is really worth mentioning twice. Not only does Telltale put out the best adventure games around these days, these prices are incredibly bargain basement. Here’s a sampling of my recommendations:

Sam and Max Complete Collection – $12.50
Max and Crossbones T-Shirt – $4.75
Sam and Max: Freelance Police Complete Series DVD set –  $6.24
Tales of Monkey Island Deluxe Treasure Chest (pre-order) – $12.50
(includes Tales of Monkey Island full season and a TON of prizes)
Poker Night at the Inventory – $1.25
Back To The Future T-shirt – $4.74

There’s a whole lot of other cool stuff over at Telltale’s store, and the sale is on now until June 30. Don’t forget to consult with Nathaniel Hoover for more details.

Homeless (Absolutely Free)

Sony’s PlayStation Network is back up, and they’ve begun their Sorry-Your-Credit-Card-Information-Was-Stolen-and-Someone-in-Boseman-Montana-Used-it-To-Buy-a-Keurig-Coffee-Machine-and-Six-Hundred-Dollars-Worth-Of-iTunes-Downloads-So-Now-Your-Credit-is-Destroyed-and-You-Can-No-Longer-Get-Loans promotion (called the “Welcome Back” promotion for brevity). This entitles everybody who had an account before PSN got cyber-9/11’d to pick two free games out of a list of five. The games to choose from (in order of my personal preference) are:

LittleBigPlanet – If you have a PS3 and you don’t have this game, then you’ve already made your first decision and now must decide what your second game will be.
inFAMOUS – A ransom note of a game that seems to rip a bunch of elements from other games (Assassin’s Creed’s roof-jumping parkour, every Bioware game’s paragon/puppy kicker morality system, BioShock’s plasmids if you only ever got electric and a stoic, gravelly-voiced, personalityless main character which we’ve seen in EVERY FPS EVER), and it actually puts them all together into a game that seemed pretty fun in the small amount of time I’ve played it.
Wipeout HD – A futuristic racing game that plays like a combination of Mario Kart and F-Zero.
Super Stardust HD – It’s like Asteroids, but confined within the orbit of a planet. It’s a simple game and seems like just the thing if you just want to kill a few minutes with a quick pick-up-and-play game.
Dead Nation – It’s a…oh Christ, come on, let’s not lie to each other; we both know what this game is about. Zombies. It’s yet another top-down zombie shooter, but, thankfully, it’s well made and pretty fun.

You also get two PSP games from a selection of four (LittleBigPlanet, ModNation Racers, Pursuit Force, and Killzone Liberation). I haven’t played any of these so I can’t give a synopsis.

Now, earlier I said that this promotion applies to everyone who had an account before the big PSN outage. Just to clarify, I mean everyone. If your wife, roommate, boyfriend, cousin or pet iguana had an account all on the same PS3, you all get two games.

It doesn’t end at the free games, though. You also get 30 days of Playstation Plus for free, too. For those unaware, here’s some quick info on how Playstation Plus works.

Basically, you can access a whole list of deals that regular PSN members can’t. This includes free or discounted games, game add-ons, avatars, and themes. Free games can only be played for as long as you’re a PS Plus member. Discounted games or any add-ons, themes, or avatars (free or otherwise) will stay with you even if you drop PS Plus. At the time of writing, members can get Sonic the Hedgehog 2, Oddworld: Abe’s Exodus, Comet Crash and a slew of PS3 Minis games for free. Remember, since these go away in a month unless you renew PS Plus, it might be a good idea to play these and get your fill and play your other free games in a month. Also, download all add-on content for any game you so much as think you could possibly own and play in the future. The add-ons are free and they stay with you, so you might as well cash in. For those who had PS Plus before the outage, you’ll get a 60-day extension.

 

You also have access to 100 free PS Home items (nobody cares so I’m not going to list them all here), and you can rent Ghostbusters, Bad Boys or Final Fantasy: The Sprits Within. So, one classic everybody’s seen and two giant piles of stupid. Obviously Sony didn’t dig too deep into the Columbia Pictures vaults for these, but you can’t win them all I guess.

So, PSN users, I hope this has been helpful to you, and that, once you choose your games, 22 hours later when they’re done downloading, and 17 hours after that when they’re done installing, and 11 hours after that when they’re done updating, and about a half hour after when you agree to all the EULA screens, you have a delightful time with your pile of free games courtesy of Sony and their complete and utter ineptitude.