swat-4 posts

It's Wednesday and that means its time for the PC game download site Direct2Drive to offer up a new set of games on sale for just $6 as part of its sixth anniversary this month. From now until next Wednesday, the list of games that are on sale for $6 each include Zombie Pirates, Fallen Earth, Sid Meier's Pirates, SWAT 4, Disciples II Gold, Frontlines Fuel of War, King's Bounty: Armored Princess, Fort Zombie and Crayon Physics Deluxe.

In addition for today only, Direct2Drive has put The Sims 3 on sale for $19.95 along with the expansion pack The Sims 3 Ambitions for #14.95.

As part of the Irrational Games relaunch, they also launched the first episode of their official podcast called Irrational Behavior. The first episode talks about ideas for games that died and during the podcast Irrational team members revealed plans for a zombie tactical shooter that ultimately was never made.

The game was called Division 9 and was first pitched in the early 2000s to the now defunct Vivendi Games as a possible new direction for the SWAT series (Irrational had developed the fourth game in the series from the publisher). The game was prototyped as a kind of shooter with some strategic elements. While Vivendi passed on the game, Irrational head man Ken Levine said they actually sold Division 9 to an unnamed publisher. However, for reasons that were not entirely made clear in the podcast, the game was canceled. Irrational went on to be bought by Take Two Interactive and of course made the original BioShock. The web site plans to reveal assets from Division 9 on January 22.

By the way, the podcast is definitely NSFW so listen with headphones. Perhaps while playing Darksiders or Line Rider if that floats your boat.

There are just a few more days left until the end of Direct2Drive's 24 Days of Christmas sales promotion. Today's latest one day sale takes the promotion into indie games territory with Machinarium. From now until 1 pm Eastern time on Tuesday you can purchase and download the acclaimed adventure game from developer Amanita Design for just $9.95.

Direct2Drive also has some tactical shooters on sale for one day today. Specifically they have SWAT 4, the 2005 released game from Irrational Games (now 2K Boston). You can get the original game for just $7.50, the expansion pack The Stetchkov Syndicate for $4.95 or SWAT 4 Gold with both the original game and the expansion for $9.95.