$119.01USD — that’s what I spent during Steam’s holiday sale. For less than the price of two new console games, I bought nineteen PC games, all from Steam. Although I was aware of sales at other stores, I bought nothing from them. Steam demanded my undivided attention; its two week store-wide sale grabbed me, and its daily sales held me tightly. Just as a clumsy analogy reinforcing a simple point, Steam’s sale refused to go unnoticed, and it refused to be forgotten. No other digital distributor’s sales accomplished this; apart from some festively redesigned websites, they were unremarkable.
Continue »

GOG.com is running a weekend sale until Monday, April 6th that’ll get you Broken Sword 2: The Smoking Mirror and Broken Sword 3: The Sleeping Dragon together for just $9.98. Of the two games we’ve only featured Broken Sword 2, but I can also vouch for the quality of Broken Sword 3, so save a couple dollars with this pack while you can.

Issue #7 of Air was released on the week of March 18th for only $1. I looked around online and saw that it had been marketed as a good jumping on point for new readers. Before I dive in to this issue, I thought that I should post about this special price. I wish that I could have posted about the $1 issue before it came out, but I’m sure copies are still available for that price at your local comic shop, if not online. Do check it out.

The latest Steam Weekend Sale for February 20th through the 22nd is debuting a new indie game bundle for just $9.99. Inside the pack are several games that have been featured here at Downloadable Suicide including Eets, Trials 2 and the recently expanded Gravitron 2. Also included in the package are I-Fluid and the multiplayer version of the award-winning RTS Darwinia, Multiwinia. After the sale, the bundle (if it still exists) will cost $44.95.

For this weekend only, the DoSu-featured independent game Gish is on sale for $3.99 on Impulse, StarDock’s burgeoning competitor to Valve’s Steam service. Gish on Impulse usually costs $19.95 as opposed to Steam’s $9.99, which is why it isn’t linked in our database.

If you’ve never used the Impulse service before, it’s very similar to Steam. You can browse and purchase games as well as download demos either from their website or from within the Impulse client. Games you own show up within the client and can be downloaded there. One key difference from Steam is that the Impulse client does not need to be running in order to play your games; there isn’t even a background process for authentication. Pricing, game selection and community features leave a bit to be desired when compared to Steam, but it’s still a fine place to purchase games when the price is right.

To make some sense out of the second half of the title, I also wanted to bring up a relevant item from Edmund McMillen, creator of Gish. This is a Cry for Help is a CD collection of ten years worth of Edmund’s work as an independent artist. The CD includes 17 games (including Gish), 15 comics and a ton of extras including artwork and animations. While some games – such as Cunt – are flash games which can be played for free through a browser, I felt the collection was worth purchasing not only for the sake of convenience, but to support the creator as well. If you’re thinking of buying Gish anyway, I suggest getting this CD instead as Gish is included and it will only cost you $10 plus shipping.