Not going to be posting much/at all this week

There probably not going to be very much activity on SavyGamer this week, I’m away in Bath doing a week’s work experiance at PC Gamer, and not going to have much of a chance to be posting here.

If you see any particularly good deals, twit them at me to either @LewieP or @SavyGamer and I will try to RT them. XxX

Here is a list of games currently on Steam that already have a native mac port in existence

Looks like Steam is coming to mac, and likely with mac ports of Valve’s games. Read more…

WHSmiths’ last act of video games retail is a feeble trickle of dribble from it’s gaping slack-jawed mouth, as it begins crawling into the fetal position, ready to drift into a coma

In years gone by, WHSmiths has been a place people chose to go and buy entertainment software from. They had shelves bursting with cassettes, cartridges and discs. Read more…

The real cost of Asda price

I decided that I would like to purchase some groceries. I went to the nearest Asda to offer them cash in exchange for goods, as is the tradition with supermarkets these days. Read more…

Guide to using google buzz

1. Open up mail.google.com in your browser of choice.
2. Scroll to the bottom of the page.
3. Click here:

See comments for more essential information.

Mass Effect 2 Winners

Well done folks, here are the four winners of Mass Effect 2 [Digital Deluxe Edition], courtesy of Direct2Drive:
Andy (Anarki)
Rory Porteous
Scott Maxwell
Jennifer Allen

Well done to the winners, I hope you enjoy the game. The winners of the Bob came in pieces competition will be announced shortly.

Digital Rights and Wrongs: The state of DRM

Last week, Ubisoft announced their Online Services Platform. A mechanism by which they can offer gamers “exceptional gameplay and services that are not available otherwise“.

Upshot: If you go to a video game store/download service and purchase a Ubisoft game for the PC, you will not be able to play this game unless you are connected via the world wide web to Ubisoft servers. If you are playing a game, and your internet connection cuts out, your game will pause until it is able to reconnect. In return, there won’t be any CD checks, and they will offer (translation: force) cloud saving. The first game to be affected is going to be Settlers 7 (£26.73 delivered), but you can expect Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands, Silent Hunter V, Splinter Cell: Conviction, R.U.S.E., Scott Pilgrim vs. the World and other future titles from Ubisoft to use the online services platform.

I have lots of thoughts about this, which I’ll get to eventually, but I thought now would be as good a time as any to take stock of the state of DRM in general, and some of the surrounding issues. I spoke to lots of different people, all with different perspectives on DRM. Here’s what they said. Read more…

Interview: Quantic Dream’s David Cage

At the Eurogamer Expo last year, we sat down with David Cage to talk about Heavy Rain, the demo at the expo fresh in our minds. As the release of the game next month draws closer, take a look at how Heavy Rain came to be.

The first impression we got from Heavy Rain was that it seems a lot like a spiritual successor to Fahrenheit, in that you’ve taken the ideas you’ve had for the design for that, and built it up. Is that how the design came about?

Well, yes and no. In fact, we see Fahrenheit as the prototype to Heavy Rain. With Fahrenheit we really experimented; we wanted to know if it was possible to tell a story through gameplay and not through cutscenes. We also wanted to see if there was a market for this and if people were interested in seeing what we were doing. We got positive answers to these two questions, so we started really working hard on Heavy Rain, trying to figure out what went well on Fahrenheit, and what didn’t work, and how we could improve it. So we spent some time reading reviews and on forums listening to gamers and what they had to say – what they liked, and what they didn’t like, and designed the game accordingly. Read more…

Bayonetta Winner!

Congratulations to Charles Rea, the kind folks at Zavvi have got a copy of Bayonetta with your name on it.

Commiserations to everyone else, but we’ve got some other exciting competitions on the way too, so keep your eyes pealed.

2000-2009: The ones that got away

The beginning of the year 2010 marks the end of another decade. A decade in which lots of video games got made. Most of them got played too, although some of them maybe didn’t get played as much as they should have, or didn’t get the recognition we think they deserved. We’ve compiled a list of 33 games, although it really could have been any number, that we loved for one reason or another. Maybe you’ve already played them, but maybe you’ll find a game that you never played. If, in our finite wisdom, we’ve missed a personal fave of yours, please correct this injustice and tell us what and why in the comments. Read more…

Victory is ours

We spoke and they listened. Read more…