evil-genius posts

Evil Genius was a fun 2004 strategy-sim game from the now defunct Elixir Studios that put you in the role of a super-spy themed villain trying to take over the world. The game got good reviews but didn't register in the sales department. UK-based Rebellion bought the rights to the game and re-released it as a digital download game.

Now Rebellion has launched a new Evil Genius game, this time for Facebook (in fact the Facebook game launched a month ago but it was only today that Rebellion set out a press release announcing its presence). Evil Genius: WMD is Rebellion's first game for the social networking genre and lets players become their inner Goldfinger by expanding their crime network and bringing in friends to help.

In order to celebrate the official announcement of Evil Genius: WMD, the original Evil Genius PC game is available to purchase via Steam for just $2.50, a 75 percent savings.

You thought we were done with PC game download sales on Thursday, didn't you? As it turns out there are a few more price cuts that we found out about after we posted up the news yesterday.:

• Steam has just launched the indie puzzle game QuantZ and is giving folks a 50 percent discount for its first week, bringing the price down to just $4.99.
• GoG.com is selling the two games in its library from the now defunct Elixir Studios, Republic The Revolution and Evil Genius, in a bundle for just $9.98 until Monday.
• Impulse users can get a 50 percent discount on the Galactic Civilizations II Expansion Bundle (featuring Dark Avatar and Twilight of the Arnor) for 50 percent off with the coupon code CGEXPANSION.
• The indie action-puzzle game Grappling Hook's price was just reduced to $14.95.

GameTap's latest addition to its premium subscription service is Evil Genius, the terrifically campy super-spy villain sim-strategy game that was released in 2004 from the now defunct Elixir Studios. As we reported earlier this year, the rights to the game have been bought by Rebellion and the UK developer is thinking about reviving the game and others it has bought from the former Vivendi Games.

GameTap has also freed up one of the chapters of the episodic action game American McGee's Grimm. The episode, Master Thief, was a Halloween-themed chapter in the series when it was first released and in honor of the holiday GameTap is making it available for everyone to play for free for the next two weeks.

The merger of Vivendi Games with Activision in 2008 to form Activision Blizzard left a ton of former Vivendi Games properties looking for new owners. Many of them found new homes with various publishers. One of them was UK-based developer Rebellion, best known for their work on the first PC Aliens Vs Predator game. Currently the developer is working on a new AVP game for publisher Sega along with the first person shooter Rogue Warrior for publisher Bethesda Softworks.

Last week, the DRM-free download site GoG.com revealed they were adding new games owned by Rebellion to their catalog. What wasn't mentioned at the time of the announcement was that the games were actually former Vivendi Games titles that were not previously owned or developed by Rebellion. That got our curiosity up and we decided to contact Rebellion CEO Jason Kingsley to get more information.Kingsley confirmed to us that they now own the rights to release several former Vivendi Games titles. You can check out the breakdown after the jump:

GoG.com's latest addition to their DRM-free game library comes from UK-based Rebellion who are mostly known as developers of titles like the original Aliens Vs Predator and its upcoming follow up. However it appears that Rebellion has also purchased the rights to a number of older game titles from the now defunct Vivendi Games in yet another consequence of the whole Activision Blizzard merger last year.

Via Rebellion, GoG.com is now offering the 2000 released RTS game Ground Control (and its expansion) for just $5.99. Ground Control was one of the first true 3D RTS games released and comes from Massive Entertainment who later developed World In Conflict. Also, GoG.com has added Evil Genius, the 2004 released strategy-sim game from the now defunct Elixir Studios, for just $9.99. Rebellion and GoG.com plan to add other titles from the former Vivendi Games library, including Empire Earth, in the coming weeks.

Oh and head over to our sister site Joystiq for a chance to win a free GoG.com game code.

A number of game download web sites have announced new additions of games to their various line-ups of titles. One is GamersGate who just announced today that they are the latest provider for the Unreal series of games. Their deal with Epic Games covers all of the PC games released in the Unreal franchise (Steam and Gametap have similar deals).

On the DRM-free site GoG.com they have added the 2005 released sci-fi RTS game Earth 2160 to its line-up for just $5.99. And Steam has recently added the terrific 2004 strategy game Evil Genius (from the now defunct Elixir Studios) to its download library for $9.99