Welcome to Calendar Man where I tell you about the week’s upcoming releases as well as point out deals to help keep your cold, hard cash where it belongs, namely in your wallet.
Ah May, what a glorious month! My birthday is in May, as is my mom’s birthday and my son’s adoption day. Coincidentally, those last two are the same day, although they weren’t planned to be. Navigating a foreign adoption is tricky enough without asking the courts to do things on a particular date. May is also home to Mother’s Day, so if you haven’t already, put a card or gift in the mail for mom. With so many holidays in our house at such close proximity to each other, May is also a spectacular month for desserts. Just in time for swimsuit season!
Enough calendar blathering. Let’s talk games.
Thor: God of Thunder releases this week and if the folks on my achievement hunting boards are to believed, it’s pretty terrible. Shocking! I may be reviewing it for GameShark, depending on review copy availability and as much as I like the extra cash, if review copies end up not being a possibility, I’m not sure I’ll weep too much for the son of Odin. Still, if you’re up for it, it’s coming out for every console out there.
- Thor: God of Thunder – 360
- Thor: God of Thunder – PS3
- Thor: God of Thunder – Wii
- Thor: God of Thunder – DS
If you draw a venn diagram that includes one set of racing fans and one set of fans of the apocalypse and you find yourself a member of the intersection of these sets, Motorstorm Apocalypse may be the game for you. I remember the original Motorstorm endlessly looping on the PS3 demo unit that was set up at the Circuit City right down the road from where I work. Oh Circuit City, with your perennial inability to stock anything new on release day, it’s no surprise you went belly up.
The History Channel continues it’s line of historical video games with History Great Battles Midieval, an RTS set during the Hundred Years War. You can play as either the British or the French. I’m assuming those were the big players. It would be silly if the History Channel got the historical aspects of the game incorrect and threw in some saucy Korean troops for good measure.
Finally, the new Mount and Blade expansion, With Fire and Sword comes out on Tuesday, available at fine, digital retailers everywhere. Bill has been playing a preview build and is terrible at it. Maybe you can do better. Here’s a hint, pikes and horses do not mix.
Deals
I’ll get to the store specific deals in a minute, but basically everyone and their mother now has Portal 2 on sale. Kmart started it by dropping the price to $35. Amazon matched it, and then Best Buy did too (sort of). The $40 price at Best Buy is unadvertised, but you can see it online. So, bottom line is that if you bought Portal 2 when it launched, I’d see if you can get a retroactive price match. Also, buying games at launch is now becoming more and more financially unsound.
Toys R Us – Save $20 on either CoD:BLOPS or Mortal Kombat. Get $50 gift card and $20 PSN card with purchase of PS3 or get $50 gift card and 1600 pt card with purchase of Xbox 360.
Target – Free $50 gift card with purchase of Xbox 360 Kinect bundle. Free $10 gift card with purchase of Michael Jackson the Experience (any platform)
Best Buy – Free $50 gift card with purchase of Xbox 360 Kinect bundle. Free $30 gift card with purchase of any two Call of Duty titles. Get two of the following Kinect games for $60: MJ: The Experience, Kinect Sports, Zumba Fitness, Biggest Loser, Motion Sports, Your Shape, Yoostar 2.
Kmart – Portal 2 for $34.99.
GameStop – I usually don’t mention GameStop here, but they have Portal 2 for $40 for 360 and PS3 and $30 for PC.
Steam – Steam has all of the Mount & Blade games on sale including the Complete pack which includes Mount & Blade, Warband and With Fire & Sword for 20 bucks. Check out al of the deals on the specials page.
I totally agree with you that buying games at launch isn’t the best idea the majority of the time anymore unless someones got a really good deal going on. I haven’t been able to buy as much as I used to/would like to but the last few times I did buy at launch I ended up getting burned (Force Unleashed 2) or missing out on a better deal soon afterwards. The only caveat I could really see here is what is a good amount of time to wait, as if the game you are looking at has a big multiplayer focus, if you wait too long you may miss the boat as the gaming masses have moved on to the next big thing, although I guess in all reality no one really seems to be moving to anything other than CoD:BO.
I agree with you on the multiplayer side, however recently it seems like retailers are dropping the price of games by 20 bucks or so just a couple of weeks after launch. At that point, the MP community is still going strong.
It’s entertaining to read things like “I’ll get to ____ in a minute, but first…” Because as a reader, I can just skip down to the list of deals or whatever it is. Do you think those kind of phrases mean something different to you as a writer, who might literally take a minute or two to get to it? Or is it really just a figure of speech now?
There’s something very at odds with offering preorder crap bonuses to encourage people to go for the day one purchase…and then dropping the price by twenty dollars within two weeks. Which is it, publishers? They’re trying to train the consumer to preorder for the junky costumues or whatever, but then punishing them by making the game depreciate sooner.
I think it’s telling, and what’s it’s telling is that the $60 standard retail price is too high in a day and age where people can download a surprisingly full-featured Dead Space game onto their phone for a dollar or buy a bundle of great games from Steam for virtually pennies on the dollar.
It’s one thing for a game to go on sale for five bucks off two weeks later…but 35-40% off
I consider my words sacred, never to be skipped. I’m also allowing ample time for the genius of my statements to sink in.
Seriously, when I write, I think of it as a conversation and as much as people who speak to me in real life would like me to skip right to the good parts, I do tend to ramble.
I’m not sure this is a publisher decision. Kmart has been making some very aggressive moves lately in their sale pricing for new games. Add to that the ability to request a price match on Amazon and you have other sites scrambling to match. I bet that all of these stores are taking a hit on selling Portal 2 that low but they don’t want to miss out.
This reminds me of the Walmart-Amazon-Target book war from a year or so ago when Walmart started discounting hardcover books and Amazon and Target matched them move for move. I ended up getting Under the Dome for like 8 bucks shipped. Not bad for a hardcover. Not a bad Stephen King book either. It had a Jack Reacher reference in it which pleased me greatly.
That’s true, it could be price-warring to some extent, not so much publisher-mandated price drops. But still, you’ve got publishers trying to support retail with these day one, preorder bonuses, but then the retailers go and drop the price right after release.
Just put the damn things on sale the first week they’re out, like what happens with DVDs and records.