Back in the fall of 2007 I bought the CD version of the ‘Special Edition’ of Gods: Land of Infinity for $20 – and thought it was a great deal! It recently went on sale through Strategy First and I grabbed the digital version, paying ~$5. It was an instant buy for me because I had never seen it below $15, and even now lists at that price or higher everywhere, with occasional $9.99 sales.
But now Strategy First has the full Gods: Land of Infinity for $9.99 … oh wait, they are throwing in 19 other full games as well! They call it the “Take-No-Prisoners Strategy Pack”. I call it a BUY IT NOW deal!
From the review I wrote for Gods: Land of Infinity for yet another dead gaming site (thank goodness I keep all my old text files!):
Take a game released in Europe to mixed but mostly positive reviews, blend together bug fixes, re-balancing and other technical changes, and the addition of ‘glamor model’ Kyla Cole as the avatar and face of the main character, and you have a ‘special edition’ ready for release in the US. The game is a first-person role-playing game with turn-based combat and plenty of little extras to keep you busy!
When I think of ‘game packs’, I think back to the early 3.5 Mac/5.25 PC floppy disks that you could get cheap at the local computer store loaded with 20 games. The names were vaguely familiar, but in reality they were a bunch of low-budget knock-offs that weren’t worth the money you spent, and were generally the first disk to get reformatted in a pinch!
That is definitely NOT the case here – games like Sacred, Disciples II, Jagged Alliance, Patrician, Port Royale and others are well worth purchase on their own. Combining it all for $10 is just crazy!
Here are the contents, courtesy of Deals4Downloads:
1/20 Alliance: Future Combat:
2/20 Combat Mission: Barbarosa To Berlin:
3/20 Combat Mission: Beyond Overlord:
4/20 DarkStar One:
5/20 Disciples II: Gallean’s Return:
6/20 Disciples II: Rise Of The Elves Gold:
7/20 GODS: Lands of Infinity Special Edition:
8/20 Jagged Alliance 2: Gold Pack:
9/20 Jagged Alliance 2: Unfinished Business:
10/20 O.R.B.: Off-World Resource Base:
11/20 Patrician III: Rise of the Hanse:
12/20 Port Royale 2:
13/20 Sacred Gold:
14/20 Space Empires IV Deluxe:
15/20 Space Empires: Star Fury:
16/20 Strategic Command: European Theater:
17/20 Strategic Command 2: Blitzkrieg:
18/20 Tortuga: Pirates of the New World:
19/20 Tortuga: Two Treasures:
20/20 World War II: Frontline Command:
They estimate that based on the current prices of these games that you save 96% (let alone basing it on useless ‘list prices’)! So head on over to Strategy First and pick up the Take-No-Prisoners Strategy Pack! As noted on the image above the sale lasts from now until next Monday, March 28th.
UPDATE: I bought this last night and wanted to make a few notes:
- Remember that you have to use the code ‘TNPSALE’ – when you click on the link you will likely pass out when you see the $69.99 price tag! Enter the code and all is well with the world!
- Also note that by default ‘download protection’ is selected for $4.95 – this is a one year thing that allows you to re-download for a year. I was one click away from paying for it before I noticed the PayPal total of $14.95!
- Strategy First uses Plimus for downloads (and thus the ‘download protection’). I have only used them for a few things through the years, and have always made sure to backup my download files immediately! That is because they remind me of Digital River, where they quickly pull the download link after first download and leave you out of luck if things failed. In my experience they are OK if your download fails, but I have heard mixed reports beyond that.
- Because this is a 20-game collection, you will get 22 (!) emails in rapid-fire succession. One is the receipt from Plimus, another is the purchase notice from Strategy First, and the other 20 are download links for the games. They range from ~350kB to ~2GB per file, with more than half simply named ‘Setup.exe’. Oh yeah, joys abound …
- Finally, my Norton 360 was going off on about every other file, so I decided to just download everything on the Mac and post-scan them all. Everything looked like false warnings, but I will know more after I start installing.
