Two Game Combo Deals and More Deal Aggregators

First things first: GameStop has a couple of combo packs on sale featuring the Dead Space and Dragon Age franchises. The Dragon Age pack includes DA: Origins Ultimate Edition and DA2 for $10. This is a ridiculous amount of content for 10 bucks. The Dead Space pack isn't too shabby either, featuring the original game and the sequel for $10. Both combo packs require the GameStop app and as far as I know neither one will activate on Steam, though they might work with Origin.

Continuing on the subject of game deals, there was a reddit post earlier that listed a bunch of deal aggregator sites. I covered a few of these in my Where to Find Gaming Deals Online post a couple of months ago, but a few sites on the reddit list are worth adding to the rotation.

One site in particular that looks pretty solid is IsThereAnyDeal.com; it has a ton of filters that let you sift through deals in addition to price alerts and price history. Some of the game links (particularly those from GreenManGaming) don't point to the correct page, but the author of the site was actively commenting in the reddit thread and mentioned that he'd look into it.

All of these deals have ruined me. I don't know if I could bring myself to pay full price for a game ever again - not that that's a bad thing.

Gamescom 2012: Day 0

Gamescom is "the world's largest trade fair and event highlight for interactive games and entertainment," according to the Gamescom website. The event runs from the 15th to the 19th.

As is the case with almost every major gaming show, a couple of companies jump the gun and have presentations a day or two early. Today sees press conferences by Capcom, EA, and Sony. Tomorrow, Activision/Treyarch show off Black Ops 2 Multiplayer, and Blizzard unveils the Mists of Pandaria opening cinematic on Thursday. Nvidia is also set to unveil the GTX 660 Ti on Thursday.

Verge/Polygon has a "StoryStream" post that they're updating live throughout the day with Gamescom information. The two updates that caught my eye so far are details about Dead Space 3 and the new SimCity. I bought both Dead Space and Dead Space 2 last year during the Amazon and Steam holiday sales, but I haven't played through either of them yet. I should probably get on that. As far as SimCity goes, I've been kind of itching to get my hands on a new SimCity game for a while now. I played the crap out of SimCity 2000 back in the early-to-mid 90's despite not really knowing what was going on since I was 9 or 10 at the time. The last SimCity game (SimCity 4) came out in 2003, which means we're ridiculously overdue for another installment - Maxis focused more on the Sims and Spore, neither of which I really got into. The big news from today revealed that there will be cross-platform play between Mac and PC and that there will be a PC beta that you can sign up for starting tomorrow. The site just started working for me a couple of minutes ago - the beta signup didn't work, but here's the link: http://www.simcity.com/en_US/beta/info

There should be a lot of interesting stuff coming in the next couple of days. Verge/Polygon has a good overview of the entire event that you can find here - stay tuned.