I like to keep an eye on bundles that pop up on various third-party sites, because every now and again you’ll find a hidden gem. The discounts are often great, even if the quality of the games aren’t.
But the latest offering from Bundle Stars is a little too tempting not to bite at. 41 games for less than $7.
There’s 10 separate items in total, with the majority of the 41 games coming from what’s housed in the 3D Realms Anthology. That package alone at this price makes it worth the cost of entry, but fortunately there’s other games on offer that are also intriguing.
Here’s the full list, for reference:
- Lichdom: Battlemage
- 3D Realms Anthology – Steam Edition
- Monstrum
- GemCraft – Chasing Shadows
- Battle vs Chess
- CrossCode
- Super 3-D Noah’s Ark
- Flying Tigers: Shadows Over China
- Cast of the Seven Godsends
- Horizon Shift
But the games in the 3D Realms Anthology are probably what will take your fancy:
- Alien Carnage / Halloween Harry
- Arctic Adventure
- Balls of Steel
- Bio Menace
- Blake Stone: Aliens of Gold
- Blake Stone: Planet Strike
- Cosmo’s Cosmic Adventure
- Crystal Caves
- Dark Ages
- Death Rally (Classic)
- Duke Nukem
- Duke Nukem 2
- Duke Nukem 3D
- Duke Nukem: Manhattan Project
- Hocus Pocus
- Major Stryker
- Math Rescue
- Monster Bash
- Monuments of Mars
- Mystic Towers
- Paganitzu
- Pharaoh’s Tomb
- Raptor: Call of the Shadows (1994 Classic Edition)
- Realms of Chaos
- Rise of the Triad: Dark War
- Secret Agent
- Shadow Warrior (Classic)
- Stargunner
- Terminal Velocity
- Wacky Wheels
- Word Rescue
Some of the names in that latter package are curious though. The original version of Death Rally, for instance, is available for free on Remedy Entertainment’s website — you know, the developers responsible for making the original, and the excellent free-to-play mobile re-release that was ported to Steam a number of years ago. You shouldn’t be paying for something that’s basically freeware, but that’s an argument for another time.
Out of the 3D Realms bundle, Terminal Velocity is an excellent PC classic that quite a few of you have a lot of love for. I’m starting to think that Descent 2 might actually hold up better these days — it’s certainly a lot crisper and the controls are a touch sharper — but I’m not prepared to abandon my love of TV for anything.
Beyond that, Lichdom: Battlemage might be a good kick around for a few hours. It’s a simple premise: you’re a mage, go blow stuff up. There’s a crafting system surrounding the spells and it’s not explained particularly well, but if you only get an hour or two of explosions with spells then the bundle has still proven good value for money.
Flying Tigers: Shadows Over China is still in Early Access, but it could be the surprise pick of the bundle. It’s an action WW2 airplane sim that’s more along the lines of War Thunder (in terms of controls) than a Falcon 4.0 or EF2000.
You can find plenty more fun across the board too: the original Shadow Warrior is always good for a few minutes, Wacky Wheels still has its fans, Monstrum will be interesting for those who like indie horror games, GemCraft Chasing Shadows is a full fledged expansion of the tower defence flash game that most people will have played at one stage or another, and Super 3-D Noah’s Ark is a Wolfenstein 3D clone set, well, you know where.
That’s Killer Bundle 6. It reminds me of opening stockings at Christmas and just discovering a whole bunch of games that my parents had selected for my brother and I at random. There’s some gems in there, some turds, and some surprises that you wouldn’t expect. Only difference is this costs a whole lot less: $6.92 at the time of writing.
Go surprise a friend. Your loved one. Someone on Twitter. Your grandmother. The kid next door. Anyone at a BYOC LAN. Or yourself.
Comments
16 responses to “The Biggest Bundle Stars Deal Is Absolutely Worth Your Money”
Man, take that 3D Realms bundle, add the Lucasarts one from the other day, throw throw in Commander Keen and Jill of the jungle, and that’s pretty much my childhood/teen years.
TO THE PILE WITH YOU!
Dang, I actually just bought the 3D Realms bundle the other day. Most of those games are rubbish to play nowadays but they’re fun to revisit. Still, even without the 3D Realms bundle $5 is worth it.
All of the nostalgia-feels!
I think what really sticks out for me with these games was how I had to source them. Growing up in world prior to general internet access, acquiring these games (yeah totally the shareware episodes and only the shareware episodes – a lot of my steam backlog is penance for youthful adventures in piracy) was an experience unto itself:
1 – Do some sleuthing, find out who at school has or knows someone who has said game
2 – Once you found your supplier, now comes the matter of logistics of both yourself and the virtual goods. Floppy disks were a premium and often had stuff on them I wanted to keep but couldn’t fit on my teeny hard drive. If the supplier lived beyond the range of pedal power getting a lift with parentals was a negotiation on par with UN peace talks.
3 – Get to the suppliers house and hope that their parentals haven’t imposed restrictions on foreign media and the “family computer”. Or worse because you display an aptitude for tech get roped into “just fix this one thing”.
4 – Wrangle the command line and pkzip that sucker. I could never the sytanx for “span it across multiple floppies”, so I learnt how to use msbackup from mate and used that to segment it across disks.
5 – Return home and reverse all of steps (copy to HD, msrestore, and pkunzip) and hope like HELL none of the floppy disks decided to give up the ghost. If they did repeat from step 2.
6 – Fire up the game! HAHAHAHA no. Run the setup program and hope to hell it picks up your sound blaster.
7 – Ok now fire up the game. If this wasn’t a shareware game (and if not shame on you you juvenile software pirate – yarrr!) you now have to circumvent the copy protection. Did you remember to write down the several permutations of whatever arbitrary game manual copy based protection? You only wrote down like 3? Start the game again until one of the ones you know comes up. Or if you don’t know any of them, prepare yourself for a long time of brute force trial an error.
8 – Fun addendum to step 7, while I don’t think Leisure Suit Larry intended the age verification questionnaire to be copy protection it kind of functioned the same way. I learnt a fair bit of arbitrary US general knowledge cira 1980s as a result of trial and error mentioned in step 7.
9 – You have no idea of what key does what. Spend the next hour pressing every key on the keyboard in the hopes you figure out enough to play the game.
10 – There’s also a good chance the saving and loading of games is function hidden away somewhere, hope you found it before you have to stop gaming.
While the above probably taught me a fair bit about general PC usage. I’m glad to be living in the age of internet connectivity, common hardware abstractions, and distributed gaming channels like Steam.
Around my school we used .arj for multi-disc archiving. I remember trading bundles of discs at recess. Later when domestic CD burners and cable internet became a thing, the world of game piracy exploded.
So much…this! (including the adult guilt and penance for teen times piracy)
It took me 4 x 15 min bike rides each to my mates place after school to get all the Doom install disks working! Rinse and repeat when Doom II came out 🙂 My parents then bought me Doom II for Xmas that year, made re-installing so much easier.
My yoof piracy period was during the C64 period, when EVERYTHING fit on a floppy. In fact, usually multiple games to a floppy.
Later I upgraded to am Amiga, but by then I wasn’t pirating anything.
and as if that’s not enough, Humble just launched a 25th Anniversary NEOGEO bundle so there are even more classics to revisit on a budget!
Worth it just for Math Rescue.
I can’t put my finger on the chick in the title image. Theres Duke, Seven Godsends, Battle vs Chess and CrossCode. Whats the other gal from?
cross code
The dark-haired one, second from the left…
don’t know for certain, but by elimination most likely it is from Gemcraft.
Just what I need – 41 more games in my Steam library. 🙁
COSMOS COSMIC ADVENTURE!!!!
Those actually visiting the site – there is a countdown for “this offer ends in…” This can be safely ignored, as (1) it was at two minutes when I picked up the bundle about six hours ago but the offer is still current, and (2) it’s currently at about five minutes and counting UP.
Basically the countdown is a pressure tactic. The offer itself, however, is genuine – I can confirm this as I’ve cashed in the steam keys for all games except the two I already have.