But where to buy it from? Activision have bumped the RRP up to £55 for consoles, and £40 for PCs, but we all know retailers ignore RRPs anyway.

It seems that for the most part, the 360 and PS3 versions have pricing parity, and pretty much anywhere selling them both are doing so for the same price. The PC version is proving a bit harder to nail down.

Here’s the Savy Guide for getting it for cheap.

Where to buy it – Consoles
Here is some information that may be useful to you if you want to buy MW2:

Makro are selling it to Makro members for £20.

Order it now online for £26 from coolshop £26. Likely to be non-UK stock, so you can’t trade it in.360/PS3. They have just put the prices up.

£32 from Amazon. 360/PS3.

Asda are confirmed to be selling the 360/PS3 version for £32. Valid til the 13th.
Tesco are confirmed to be selling the 360/PS3 version for £25 when bought with another chart game (which isn’t a particularly good deal, since they are fairly expensive for most chart games).
Sainsburys are confirmed to be selling the 360/PS3 version for £26. Valid til the 15th. It also seems some stores are letting you phone and reserve. Store locator with phone numbers here.

I do not yet have confirmed prices for Morrisons, Toys R Us or anywhere else, if you find some evidence of pricing, please let me know.

I also spoke to my local Gamestation, and they said they will not budge at all on their price of £39.99.

The real interesting thing here is this:
Should you go to a Currys, which are selling the game for £44.99 on 360/PS3, then use their price match policy, you should be able to get the game for only £24.11. This is what I intend to do. PC World will match Asda’s price, bringing their own price down to £30.71, but they don’t price match Sainsburys.

Where to buy it – PC
This is a difficult one. Coolshop (who I can vouch for) are selling it for £24.99 delivered. Some people who have received their games early from Coolshop have reported that they have been getting a “Not for sale in the UK” version. Whilst Valve have deactivated some games when they have been from imported serials, they have never done this within the EU, and indeed EU law would prevent them.

I have not heard anything about any other retailers offering good prices on it. The retail version comes with a serial that you plug into Steam, and it gets added to your Steam account, and whilst retail serials won’t activate on Steam right now, they will by tomorrow. As and when I hear UK retailers discounting it, I’ll update this post.

As far as digital distribution goes, only Steam will be selling it, because every other major outlet have decided not to, because of its Steamworks integration.

This comes as a bit of a surprise to me, since both Direct2Drive and GamersGate already sell several games which require Steam, such as Saints Row 2, Defense Grid and Zeno Clash.

It’s hard to know what side to root for. On the one hand, I definitely think that competition, and fair competition, is beneficial for consumers and essential for ensuring that as consumers shift towards digital distribution, they don’t sacrifice their consumers rights and power.

On the other hand, there are a lot of reasons why developers of all shapes and sizes might want to use Steamworks. I’m pretty sure that Audiosurf would not have been as successful as it was without Steamworks, and it will have probably made developing MW2 for the PC easier for Infinity Ward.

One important fact that seems to have been forgotten in the discussion of the MW2 boycott so far is that Valve do not force games that use Steamworks to have a presence on the Steam marketplace. 2K’s NBA09 uses Steamworks, but it is not available on the Steam marketplace at all. If Activision decided to, they could have made the game an exclusive with one of the other outlets, and still used Steamworks. The only reason most games that use Steamworks also sell through the Steam marketplace is that it is cost effective for them to do so.

Additional information
If you have preordered it from somewhere, thinking that it would save you money, then firstly, next time anyone in GAME asks you to preorder something, tell them “No, it will be cheaper in the supermarkets”. Secondly, here is what you can do.

If you preordered it in store somewhere, as long as you keep the game sealed and keep your receipt, you should be able to return it for a full discount.

If you ordered online, as long as you keep the game sealed and keep your receipt, then according to the UK distance selling regulations, you will be able to return your game to the retailer for a full discount.

If you have already got it, or want to get it at a midnight launch and play through the night, so you want to open it before the supermarkets or Currys open, here is something that should work. If you have one opened copy of the game bought for a higher price, and the receipt, head along to Currys, buy the game for their discounted price, and keep it sealed. Then you should be able to return the sealed copy you got from Currys to the other retailer, with the other receipt. You end up essentially paying the lower price.

Insane discount on this, before it’s even out!

A must own for anyone with a PSP, this is one of the happiest games ever.

Review by Bobby Foster

I’ve become a willing participant in the rape and murder of seven young women. I say “young women”, but five of them you’d definitely call girls. What worries me is that I’m not sure I even regret it.

It needn’t have worked out like this. I’d happily have taken each of them safely to Grandma’s house and let them live there happily ever after. To begin with that’s what I did, and young sweet Robin looked so peaceful cuddled up next to Grandma. But the game wasn’t about that. It told me I hadn’t found any of the secret rooms, picked up any of the collectibles, nor met “the wolf”. I had failed. It was clear that next time, I would have to walk off the path.

Things then started to get strange. I headed off into those woods determined to keep sight of where I’d come from, but along the way I must have let myself get turned around. Pretty quickly I’d lost all my bearings and couldn’t find my way back even though I’d wanted to. Knowing I’d gone off course and uncertain of how to proceed, I had no choice but to wander aimlessly for a while. Then in the distance I caught a glimpse of another young girl, dressed in white, running between the trees. Was she a ghost? I didn’t know. But by now I had no idea where I was and felt the only thing I could do was run after her.

She led me to an abandoned theatre. We got up on the stage and danced and played together, and then she lent in to give me a hug. Before I had any chance of finding out who she might be, she ran off.

Lost and alone again, I kept walking. I came across an abandoned wheel chair, and sat on it.

“Wolves are just dogs. But werewolves are like people.”

What did that mean? I couldn’t be sure. But it certainly seemed I was getting closer to encountering the wolf. I knew now that it was only the wolf that could lead me to “Success”.

…

This is the Path. Incredibly bold in its choice of subject matter and for its narrative ambiguity, but sufficiently flawed that I have to break out of telling you the story of my game to explain some of the stuff that’s likely to test your patience.

For starters, the pacing. Everything is designed to make you take your time. If you run for too long, your view pans down, and collectable items and interactive objects fade out of view. There are some moments when you can only move in a straight line, crawling forward at a painfully slow pace with no interaction required aside from holding down the forward key. At others, you’ll be forced to move along a fixed path regardless of what key you press, taking in the scenes like you’re riding a demented Tunnel-o-Love. You often end up with the sense that you’re bumbling (slowly) through what the game wants to show you, rather than being in control of what’s happening.

It gets repetitive too. Despite sublime sound design, the woods themselves are flat and often uninteresting. Aside from the collection of slightly-interactive objects through which the abstract narrative unfolds, you spend most of your time collecting the 144 flowers there are in the game. What’s the point of collecting these flowers? I don’t know. I finished with 142 of them, and it was never made clear to me what benefit they were giving me or what I might gain from painstakingly trying to find the last couple.

And while the game isn’t very long, it would surely benefit from being even shorter. I love the subversive way the player is given an instruction that they need to wilfully disobey (“GO TO GRANDMA’S HOUSE AND STAY ON THE PATH”), but after the fifth or sixth time it loses all of its power. Similarly, during the first hour or two of playing it makes sense that you’re encouraged to play slowly, as you need a bit of time and space to think and work out what’s going on. But by the fifth or sixth hour you feel like you’ve seen enough, and the game’s slow and uncooperative controls become frustrating instead of perhaps, err, “making a provocative statement about about mankind’s desire to manipulate other people”.

Yet I want to give Tale of Tales the benefit of the doubt. It’s hugely refreshing to play something that isn’t just about goodies fighting baddies, where the imagery is full of symbolic ambiguities, and the story is implied rather than made explicit. It’s still pretty rare that game-makers trust players enough to fill in any narrative blanks for themselves, and the Path gives me hope that it will one day be possible for me to play a game and feel like an adult instead of an over-grown child.

So much of modern game design has become an exercise in bombarding the player with fun, and providing an unrelenting stream of stuff intended to stop the player getting bored or from making them want to take a break. The Path becomes boring, as well as genuinely horrific at times. I played it in forty minute chunks across the space of a week, and would be amazed if anyone could stand much longer sittings with it. Yet every day I found myself wanting to go back to it, because so much of my time not playing it I’d spent thinking about it.

The Path is atmospheric. It’s thought-provoking. And I took away as much from playing it as I have from any art gallery I’ve been to. Does that make it a good game? I hope so.

Update: It appears that this is a third party wiimote, not an official one. I didn’t even know they existed!

You can check out the interview in full by downloading the mp3 here, or listening in the handy widget below. If you’re subscribed to our podcast feed in iTunes or some other RSS reader, you’ll also have this file waiting for you there. Now, isn’t that convenient? Don’t say we never do anything for you.

That was fun whilst it lasted:

Windows 7 Ultimate Reward
Unfortunately due to a posting on a public website we are having to suspend all orders on Expertzone and the Windows 7 Specialist Programme until the 16th November. The system has been compromised by people that do not work for qualifying UK Retailers.

We apologise for any inconvenience caused but we hope to resolve this issue shortly through a validation process to confirm all users are legitimate and meet the qualifying criteria.

Party’s over folks, you don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.

Cracking bundle from Amazon here. Add the 360 Elite and the Wireless Entertainment Pack to your basket, then pick any 2 of these games:
Dragon Age: Origins
Forza 3
WWE Smackdown vs Raw 2010
Brütal Legend
FIFA 10
Borderlands
Wolfenstein
Star Wars: Some crap or other
Need for Speed: Shift
Wet
Up
Halo 3: ODST

Thanks to Persus-9 and Sam for the tip off.

If you say you from the United States, you don’t get charged VAT.

The winners are:

By Tibor

and

By Toby

And one more on the way.

Congratulations to the winners (keep and eye on your inboxes), commiserations to those who didn’t win. Pretty much every entry was fantastic in one way or another, so you should all be proud of that.

You can get Dragon Age: Origins from D2D here, or Amazon here.

Gamestation have a policy for trading in games, called “We won’t be beaten on trade-ins”, just check the back of any receipt. They are pretty good at plastering this policy over their shops and printed materials, but not so good at explaining what it means.

I spoke to my local Gamestation’s manager to find out exactly how it works. He said that if any store within 40 miles from the Gamestation in question will offer a better or equal price for a trade in, they will match it, and then beat it by one pound.

Examples:
GAME offers me £5 for “Manshooter 7: The bulleting”, but Gamestation only offer me £4, I can tell them that GAME offered £5, and then Gamestation will offer me £6.

HMV offer me £8 for “Car wot goes fast 2: Off-Road”, and Gamestation offer me the same £8. I can then tell them that HMV offered me £8, and then Gamestation will offer me £9.

However (and this is just for my local store mind) there are a few conditions:

• You must bring some form of written/printed out evidence of what the other shop offered.
• The condition must be acceptable.
• And importantly, it is entirely at the managers discretion. If they decide they don’t want to honour this policy, they don’t have to.

Seems mostly fair. He said that generally they would only refuse to honour the policy if it was a game that they sold for less than the price they would have to beat, which seems like a good compromise. I imagine in those situations you could negotiate a compromise if you wanted to.

This policy would be a lot easier to use if Gamestation published their trade in prices online, or even told you them over the phone, but they make you take games in to find out how much you would get for them.

And here is how to exploit the system.

CEX are transparent with their prices. They publish them all online. They also have a bit of a different pricing structure to Gamestation, they give measurably better prices for trade ins, but in turn generally charge more for games.

Using Gamestation’s policy on beating trade in prices, you can go online on CEX, find out exactly what they would offer you for trade in (look at the exchange price, not cash), which will pretty much universally be better than what Gamestation offer you, then add £1 for each game.

Head to the selling section of CEX’s site, add all of the games you want to trade in to your basket, and then print out the basket (and make sure to include the date). Then take the printout and games to Gamestation, and you should be able to get the prices CEX quoted + £1 each.

Tips:

• Be friendly to the Gamestation staff, since this policy is at the managers discretion, the more they like you, the more likely you are to pull it off. Chat about games with them, and be patient (trading in lots of games can take a while).
• Don’t go in with a big stack of games near closing time. Ideally if you are doing a lot of trade ins, go when they are least busy
• Typically the best games to do this on are the games that don’t have a huge amount of resell value (on eBay or wherever), but are still worth around £5 on CEX. I traded in 7 games that Gamestation wanted to give me £28 for, but I got £65 by doing this.
• Remember you don’t have to spend it there and then. It might be nice to go crazy and just buy a full price game just because you have credit, but if there is nothing you really want there and then, don’t fell like you have to spend it straight away. They can just put the credit on a gift card for you.

Let me know if you have any problems with this policy.

You register this serial on Steam.

You have to pick the GOTY edition to get that price.

I’ll look through all the entries, and announce the winners shortly

I guess I’m about to make them another great compliment then.

If you asked me to describe what genre Dante’s Inferno: The Video Game was, I’d have to answer “God of war clone”, because that is exactly what it is. It feels simply like EA wanted to make a competent God of War clone, and the cheapest way to do that was find a public domain IP that they could exploit without paying anyone any money, and then assigning one of it’s better teams the task of aping Sony’s Olympian violence ‘em up.

I’m actually having trouble separating memories from playing this and God of War III at the expo, luckily I took some notes.

Dante’s Inferno: The Video Games has combat where you press the buttons to deal different types of violence out on your enemies. There’s the small violence button, the medium violence button, and the big violence button. Pressing these in different orders makes combos of violence happen. Mix in some QTEs, and some boss fights, and that’s pretty much your game.

In this demo, I started off on a level that was the back of a giant. He was arched over, and the action was taking place on his spine and ribcage. I had to kill some smaller enemies, then damage a big one enough to make it let me climb on top of it.  Once I climbed on top of the big one, I snapped the giants head off by pressing buttons when it told me to.

Then (whilst still on the top of the bigger enemy), I jumped onto a big set of crumbling walls, and I had to climb to the top.

This bit was pretty badly designed. I had to jump (pressing the X button on the PS3 pad) to scale faster, except if you weren’t lined up just right, you would get caught on the edges, and if you get delayed by more than a second, you are dead. Back to the bottom. I was hammering X to make sure I jumped fast enough, and as I reached the top (still hammering X) a QTE started without warning, and I failed it because I was still hammering X. QTE failed. Dead. Back to the bottom.

I very nearly ragequit there and then, but the (younger) person next to me had no trouble with this bit, and I didn’t want to look like a moron, so I persevered. I didn’t enjoy that section, but I guess I made it through it eventually.

Then there was a boss fight, that was ok. I had to time some jumps, and press more buttons when it told me to.

It’s very hard to be excited about Dante’s Inferno: The Video Game, it is certainly not pretty enough to get by on that alone, and it seems like an uninspired, unambitious take on a formula that far from short of more interesting competition. Maybe a God of War clone would be more attractive if a new God of War was not out so soon, and I would probably direct 360 gamers eager for some action to Bayonetta, or even DMC4 over Dante’s Inferno: The Video Game.

I’ll buy it at a high price, it would seem. This import only PS3 RPG is really tough to find for cheap, in fact this is one of the only places I’ve seen selling it for under £40. They ship from inside Europe, so there is no risk of getting extra custom charges. Let me know if you see it cheaper elsewhere.

They gave that all up for a dream. A dream of a bloke on a motorbike going from left to right.

A dream called Joe Danger.

Joe Danger’s roots can be traced back to games like Excitebike, Motocross maniacs, and more recently Trials and Little Big Planet. It’s a very colourful, fast paced stunt ‘em up on wheels.

No one element of playing Joe Danger is particularly complicated. The left stick is used to control pitch in the air, and is used for performing wheelies on the ground. Right trigger is go, left is stop, press either left or right button to perform a trick in the air, A to turbo, and hold X to duck, and release for a bunny hop.

Each of these on their own is easily manageable, but to get those high high scores, you’ll need to be on top of all of them at once. There is a combo scoring system, where chaining together everything with a wheelie gets you shedloads of points.

You get a bunch of points for performing a spin in the air, but if you land on your head, you’ll break your combo, go back to the last checkpoint, and loose all the points from the chain.It’s fairly easy to keep long wheelies going, but you can fall off if you aren’t careful. There are three tiers of tricks, press the trick button once to get a simple trick, worth a few points, press it twice for a medium trick, for some more, and three times for a hard trick, worth loads of points. Turbo is charged up by getting air and doing tricks, and the bunny hop move is useful for getting past obstacles, and getting additional air.

All these gameplay ideas fit together very nicely, to create a game that isn’t quite like anything else, but is a lot of fun. There is definitely going to be a big focus on high score challenges, and it will support leaderboards. You have to ballance your attention between looking at the track, and not messing up as you try to get from A to B, and making Joe do things to get him points. It’s not too difficult, but you will be retrying fairly often as you know you can do better.

The level editor, whilst not as full featured (at present) as the Little Big Planet level editor, it seems exactly like the kind of thing that people far more creative than me will be able to use to come up with some excellent levels. I just hope that Hello Games put together an infrastructure for easily sharing levels.

Like many of the games in the Indie Games Arcade, I put the controller down to let someone else have a go, not because I was bored. It was probably my 3nd favourite game of the Expo.

I’m going to spread out these over a few weeks to give you guys all time to play them (and myself time to collect all the links), then do one big post with them all collected in one place.

7 Nights
Zombie survival horror-FPS that is played straight from the browser (although you’ll need to install a plug in to do so).
Web

78641
From what I can tell, this is a game about doing things, with some pretty nice spritework.
Freeware

A new zero
Multiplayer vehicular shooty game, procedural cleverness.
Freeware

AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! — A Reckless Disregard for Gravity
Game about jumping from high up to low down, and scoring points whilst doing so. I really like this one.
Commercial with a free demo

Afflux
Puzzle game, where you use the wind to solve the puzzles.
Web

AI Wars: Fleet Command
Large scale space based strategy game, with thousands of units, and elements of various genres.
Commercial with a free demo

Air Attack
Web based game where you have to defend yourself against an onslaught of flying enemies.
Web

Algodoo
I have a fiddle with the demo of this a while ago, and it is pretty great technology, but limited by my own lack of imagination. It’s a 2D environment simulator, where you can create things out of a wide range of materials.
Commercial with a free demo

Altitude
Multiplayer 2D flying killing game, with a bit of a worms vibe to it.
Web/Freeware

Another Small Favour
Point and click adventure, with a very odd look.
Web

ASCII Portal
What it says on the tin, a puzzle game based on Valve’s Portal, but displayed in ASCII.
Freeware

ATC-SIM
Web based air traffic control simulator. What will they think of next?
Web

Attack of the 50ft Robot!
Digipen project, that Final Fantasy composer Nobuo Uematsu says “I loved it!” about.
Freeware

Auditorium
Brilliant audio puzzle game, simple, but very clever. Looks and sounds great too.
Web

Aztaka
Sidescrolling RPG with brilliant graphics.
Commercial with a free demo

Block Breakers
Another Digipen project (that’ll probably be a running theme here actually), this one is a multiplayer game that looks a little like bomberman.
Freeware

BlueHeart
A facebook game using unity player? Oh my.
Facebook

bodyGUARD
The game of the film Innerspace, it’s sort of like a shmup inside a body.
Web

Broken Brothers Deluxe
Great looking strategy game, with red, black and greyscale graphics.
Free beta

Bubblooba Online
Multiplayer take on Puzzle Bobble.
Web

BumbleTales
A “Match 3″ game with a lot of story and voiceover.
Commercial

Capoeira Legends: Chapter 1
3D action game, set in 19th century Rio de Janeiro.
Commercial with a free demo

Cease Fire
Sidescrolling beat ‘em up that appears to use digitized sprites based on actors.
Commercial with a free demo

Cephalopods Co-op Cottage Defence
Coop tower defence-esque game, that the dev said “Oh and anyone expecting a tower defence game may be disappointed, it’s closer to a co-op single screen 2D Zelda sort of game with a touch of Left 4 Dead.”
Freeware (IGF submission build)

Chromania
Colour based puzzle game.
Commercial with a free demo

City Rain
Billed as Sim City meets Tetris, it actually reminds me more of Wetrix.
Commercial with a free demo

Closure
Gorgeous monochrome 2D puzzle platformer with an interesting premise. If something isn’t lit up, it isn’t there.
Web demo version

Cogs
Very polished 3D sliding tile puzzle game, with a brilliant style.
Commercial with a free demo

Color Symphony
Sidescrolling platformer with a colour based puzzle element.
Freeware

ColorZ
Game where you have to move around absorbing viruses that are the same colour as you.
Wiiware

Comet Crash
Tower defence game with dynamic AI, and lots of enemies on screen at once.
PS3/PSN

Constellation
Space Strategy board game, designed for the PC.
Freeware

Cube Escape
Colour matching game that appears to use a motion based controller for the PC.
Freeware

Dangerous High School Girls in Trouble!
Board game for the PC with High School girls. In trouble.
Commercial with a free demo

Dead Wake
Game where you have to kill zombies.
Early version

Decades
Action puzzle game that also features trivia.
Commercial with a free demo. Also available for Facebook, iPhone and Android.

Desaturation
Horizontal SHMUP based on Chinese traditional painting.
Freeware

Don’t look back
Very eerie 2D platformer that has a complete change of gameplay towards the end. I really like this.
Web

Don’t Shit yourself
An alternative text based survival horror game.
Web

Dreamside Maroon
Another Digipen project, this is an exploration game, where the player can build a vine to the moon
Freeware

Ecolpit
A very odd looking SHMUP with abstract graphics
Demo

Endless Frogs
A platformer where puzzles are solved by frogs mating.
Web

Enviro-Bear 2000
“Who is driving the car? A bear is driving the car! How can that be?!”
Freeware

Eon
A puzzle game on an intergalactic scale
Web

Eversion
Seemingly simple and happy platformer, this game hides a secret.
Freeware

That’s A-E done. Enjoy, and be sure to let me know what you think of any of them.

Gamestation are offering Modern Warfare 2 for £5 when you trade in 2 games from a list. Included in that list is Overlord 2, which can be had for £10 here. If you buy two copies of Overlord 2, you will be able to get MW2 for £25 total.

If you have any concerns about doing this, you can always return the two games to Play for a full refund if you are unable to do it.

Gamestation are offering Modern Warfare 2 for £5 when you trade in 2 games from a list. Included in that list is Overlord 2, which can be had for £10 here. If you buy two copies of Overlord 2, you will be able to get MW2 for £25 total.

If you have any concerns about doing this, you can always return the two games to Play for a full refund if you are unable to do it.