Age of Empire III Complete Collection is $0.10 [10 Cents] on GFWL Marketplace

[Great Rumbler]

Like the title says, if you go on Games for Windows Live Marketplace right now you can pick up Age of Empires III Complete Collection for the low, low price of just 10 cents. I don't particularly like the service, but 10 cents is 10 cents, so yeah I'm gonna get it. Plus I had some points left over.

[Dark Jaguar]

*Obtained, but not installed yet* Well, I didn't need that dime anyway.

[A Black Falcon]

Yeah, I got it too, as I said in the 'games I got' thread last night.

[A Black Falcon]

At the rate it's going, the download might even be finished by sometime next week...

[Great Rumbler]

You still on 56k, ABF? I'm already up to over 50% after an hour and a half or so, should be done before too much longer.

[EdenMaster]

Only took me a couple hours to DL.

[A Black Falcon]

You still on 56k, ABF? I'm already up to over 50% after an hour and a half or so, should be done before too much longer.

Of course not, I've had cable since at least 2001... just have a really, really bad connection to the MS server for some reason.

[A Black Falcon]

So today it's Viva Pinata for $1. I might get it. :)

GFWL isn't very good, so I'd never buy something there that cost much, but $1 is too cheap to refuse.

[Sacred Jellybean]

Doncha see how they're getting you, Falcon? Those dollars add up! Viva Pinata, on the other hand, does not.

[Great Rumbler]

I used left over points that I was never going to use on anything else anyway.

[etoven]

To bad you guys arn't on TovenNet...
I can download about 4gigs in about 15 minutes..

[Great Rumbler]

If you get some fiber optics down to where I live, then I'd get on TovenNet!

[A Black Falcon]

Yeah, I don't know if I'll find the game interesting or not, but for $1, eh, why not give it a try...

Doncha see how they're getting you, Falcon? Those dollars add up! Viva Pinata, on the other hand, does not.

They're doing it to get people to come to the GFWL store and buy games other than these extremely cheap ones, though, and for me at least that's not going to happen. :)

[Great Rumbler]

The only other time I've ever bought anything from GFWL is when I got The Pitt for Fallout 3. The next time I buy something from GFWL is the next time they have some game I want for $1.

[A Black Falcon]

Yeah, agreed.

Oh, and I didn't mention it, but it was Deus Ex that was $1 a day or two ago, so I got that.

[Great Rumbler]

I've already got a free copy of Deus Ex that I've had for ages. If they had it on Steam for $1, I'd get it though.

[Sacred Jellybean]

Yeah, for only a dollar, I suppose even only a half-hour of play would make it worth the money. A normal (console) game is 50 bucks and using the same metric, 25 hours of gameplay is a decent amount to get out of it imo.

[Great Rumbler]

I hate GFWL. It keeps download corrupted files or something, forcing me to redownload the corrupted portions 500MB at a time until I can actually install the game.

In Steam you download the files, go through a brief DirectX setup, and then play.

In GFWL, you download the game, redownload files that got corrupted, go through a long install, and then play. Dumb.

[A Black Falcon]

And like Steam you can't choose where each game installs to. At least you can set download and install locations, so you can have games download to one partition and install to another (Steam does not let you do this, of course, so GFWL beats Steam on install location options, even if it's also terrible, bottom-of-the-barrel stuff), but it's only minimally better than Steam.

And then after the game installs, it does NOT create any Start Menu program group. The "Play Game" link in the GFWL store/launcher thing only opens the folder on your hard drive that the game installed to, nothing more. They evidently assume that everyone using the GFWL store plays all of their games via the awful Windows Game Explorer launcher, which is of course completely crazy.

Steam doesn't create program groups either, which is annoying, but at least the games themselves do automatically get files in the start menu in Steam. I wish they'd put them in normal folders and give links there for the manuals, readmes, etc. too, but it's better than nothing for sure. What GFWL does proves that.

I mean honestly, really, clicking "Play" in the GFWL launcher just opens the game's install folder, and then you just have to go through it, find the program file yourself (and in both AOEIII Complete and Deus Ex it's not in the main folder but in a subfolder, and AOEIII Complete of course has multiple files to run for the different campaigns, etc... not simple.)? Wha... what in the world is wrong with them? "Games Explorer or nothing" is their policy? Then why didn't GFWL's launcher open Games Explorer wehn you hit play? I mean, as I said I think the Games Explorer is utterly useless, but lanuching that would make more sense than dumping you in the install folder, at least. It's so, so bizarre...

[Great Rumbler]

I've played a little bit of VP [about 45 minutes] and I'm enjoying it so far. It's kind of annoying, though, to have all this little, unskipable scenes come up every few seconds when something happens. It feels like there's another one just when I'm in the middle of doing something, forcing me to watch the scene before I can go back to what I was doing. Not really a major thing, I suppose, just annoying. Everything else is decent enough.

[Dark Jaguar]

I've got the 360 version. This is a game where they tested the waters of "how meaningless can we make DLC?" because there's a bunch of nickle and diming "costumes" you can get for one of the characters, and nothing else. Utterly worthless.

It's a pretty good game. The cutscenes are skippable, at least in this version, but it would be nice to have an option to disable them entirely once you've seen enough.

The most annoying part so far is that opening scene. The DK Rap in DK64 is at least "so bad it's good", and is fun that way, but this is just "so bad it's bad". MS REALLY wanted to make the next Pokemon with this franchise and poored everything into making it take off, so instead of an intro that was, well, normal, they basically used a saturday morning cartoon style intro, which has nothing at all to do with the game itself (the pinatas have no human style personalities, and in fact you're raising them for the slaughter) and everything to do with getting the kids they thought would ALL be obsessed with the game to want to watch the terrible cartoon (there's a few episodes on a second disk my "special edition" came with, it's completely bland and unimaginative, a textbook sort of thing with textbook jokes and textbook characters).

Aside from that abortion though, the game itself is pretty fun. It tries to basically combine Pokemon with Harvest Moon. Mind you, it doesn't have the staying power of either, because once I did everything I quickly grew bored of it. It doesn't really have much "sandbox" potential outside of being able to design the land how you like. Not a bad game, and it's clearly a Rare game, but it could have used more development (something I'm saying a lot about Rare's recent games).

[EdenMaster]

I tell you, Viva Pinata is quite a bit of fun. It's certainly pretty far down the "masculine" chart as far as video games go, but damn did I have a good time with it.

[A Black Falcon]

Almost didn't notice it, but there was one yesterday for S.T.A.L.K.E.R. for $1. Runs until this morning. I don't think I'll get it...