For less than the $25 WoW Sparklelord pony, you could spend a bit of cash this weekend and get all of the following, rent-free:
Value is a… flexible thing, but for me and my house, I find more value in these games than anything Blizzard has to offer. Apples to oranges, perhaps, but when it’s a question of how I spend my money, this is the sort of deal that I look for. The value/cost equations make me happy.
…and if you’ve never played Master of Magic, you’re running out of excuses. If nothing else, call it research. I hear the Cub Scouts appreciate that sort of thing. You might also appreciate what Stardock is trying to do with Elemental, a spiritual successor to the MoM magic that has lied fallow for years.
Happy Mothers’ Day weekend!
Tish Tosh Tesh 
Good lord, that’s an awful lot of game for not much money… I’d be more tempted by the complete Civ 4 if I hadn’t bought the complete Civ 3 for a few quid, and not got much further than starting it up. So many games, so little time…
I completely agree. These games put many modern day games to shame. And I do not say this out of nostalgia, from a design and gameplay level they easily put them to shame. And Civ IV has quite up to date graphics on top of that.
SAD NEWS about Civilization V:
http://www.businesswire.com/portal/site/home/permalink/?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20100506005969&newsLang=en
“2K Games’ Sid Meier’s Civilization® V Shipping with Steamworks”
Invasive DRM. Guess Direct2Drive won’t sell it then, only Steam…
Yes, I’m still not terribly happy with Steam, and I *really* don’t like DRM nonsense, but at least I can wholly recommend the GOG.com “Master of” games. They are true classics, and modern games have a lot to learn from them. That GOG made them playable on modern machines without DRM is nothing short of fantastic.
Civ games are good stuff too, if you don’t mind the Steamy aspects of PC gaming.
Pretty nice deal. I’m quite tempted by Civ V when it comes out but I don’t really want to buy it through Steam… probably get the boxed copy instead.
The more I buy through Steam, the more it doesn’t bother me as much. I usually only buy games I know I’ll be playing on my PC anyway (since I don’t have a laptop) and that my internet connection will always be on for it to authenticate or whatever … but at least it’s not Ubisoft’s DRM. Dear god … Anyway, discussion for another time.
MoO was always one of my favorites. I played a game called Ascendancy I really liked as well a long, long time ago. I think even Star Wars had something like MoO done in its world, which was pretty fun. I’m not sure I have the patience for management style games anymore, but I’d be willing to try w/ Civ 5. Alpha Centauri was my first experience with those types of games and I really enjoyed it.
Tesh! You missed for 10 USD the whole Civ IV set this weekend! Bought it spent a few hours playing last night. You ought to check out Civilization Revolution on 360. It’s a boiled down version, but on my first play through of IV, I found myself wishing I could do things from the 360 version.
And I love Steam…I have a low SteamID, having got it no long after it came out as part of the CS:Source rush. Kind of like Battle.net now for WoW players, gonna be mandatory soon. In the years I’ve had Steam, they’ve never screwed me on a deal, and I love just installing it on a new PC, and downloading the games I’ve bought without worrying about finding the media and the CD keys. Buying EVE online through it(yes because of Tobold) wasn’t the easiest, but that’s the only trouble I’ve had. It would definitely suck if you had no connection, but that can be solved with a trip to McDonalds/Starbucks/Whatever to get the games downloaded.
Nevermind, I didn’t read carefully enough at all. Sigh.
I had real trouble getting MoM to play on my machine. Pity; I sure loved that game.