Just a quick one: Microsoft have put a free download of the ‘Thriller’ music video on Xbox Live in tribute to Michael Jackson. Usually it would cost 200 Microsoft points. It’s only going to available for a few days though.

How cool would it be if Sega put the Mega Drive classic Michael Jackson: Moonwalker on Xbox Live Arcade for free? Very, that’s how.

The Conduit on Wii provoked mixed reactions when it was first announced. US videogame sites wet their pants over it while UK sites (not to mention NGamer Magazine, who compared the level design to Doom 64) were less than enthusiastic. Early reviews have been around the 70% mark though, which isn’t too bad.

Where’s this all leading to? Well, a pre-order deal on Play.com caught my eye. For £29.99 you get the game in a special case, a tips guide, three unlockable items and a ball-shaped MP3 player speaker. You can view the offer here.

If The Conduit’s sci-fi setting looks a bit too clichéd for your taste then try Deadly Creatures. I’ve been playing it recently and it’s pleasingly different.

This Week’s Games

Is it Christmas already? With the amount of new games out today you’d think so – there are 12 new Wii games alone. The big multi-format ones though are Overlord 2, Fight Night Round 4, Transformers 2 and Ice Age 3: Dawn of the Dinosaurs. The Wii gets Another Code: R and the budget-priced Resident Evil Archives.

Reviews of Transformers 2 haven’t been too bad. At least the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions, which have online play, haven’t been. Apparently the Wii and PlayStation 2 versions can be finished in around four hours. That’s the same length of the film, isn’t it?

Codemaster’s Overlord 2 should be worth a look – the first was very underrated. Wii and DS owners also get to order evil minions around with Overlord Dark Legend and Overlord Minions. NGamer Magazine liked it on Wii but didn’t think much of the DS romp.

If you’re an Xbox 360 RPG fan and have finished Star Ocean already then you might like Tales of Vesperia. Superstar V8 Racing is also out – Blackbean’s racing games have always been good in the past. I’m going to give Octomania on Wii a mention too – it’s a cheapy puzzle game from Midas Interactive. Now there’s a name you can associate with quality.

Next week: Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood, Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, Ready, Steady, Cook: The Game, Rygar: The Battle of Argus and Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2010

Whether you’re a tramp having to make the change from Special Brew to Tesco value lager or an MP having to wipe your arse on £10 notes instead of £20 notes, the credit crunch has affected us all. Here are some tips to get more poorly rendered explosions for your bucks.

Import! The PlayStation 3, PSP and DS are region free while certain Xbox 360 games are too. Not only does the US get some games before us but when the dollar is weak against the pound they can be cheaper. Finding brand new DS releases for under £20 is not uncommon on sites like VideoGamesPlus, Play Asia, DVDBoxOffice and Tronix. Just be aware that you might get stung for customs charges. The sneaky sods.

Pre-order! Get your orders in quick on some websites and you may find yourself saving a few quid. Take Argos as an example – last week they had Halo 3: ODST for £26.99 but quickly upped the price as word spread. High street stores like GameStation and GAME offer extra reward points and occasionally free gifts such as t-shirts or downloadable content if you pre-order.

Bulk buy! No, not multiple copies of the same game, you silly sausage. Both GameStation and Blockbusters have 4 for £20 and 2 for £20 offers on pre-owned games. If lady luck is smiling you could walk away with four decent games for half the price of a new one. Recently I’ve spotted Eternal Sonta, Overlord, Gears of War and Oblivion in a Blockbusters 4 for £20 deal. It all depends though on what your local stores has in stock on the day you visit. Rows upon rows of sports games aren’t uncommon.

Price Match! If you only take one thing away from this feature, then let it be this. CeX is the only retailer that shows their cash and trade in prices on their website. This is ideal to use as a guide as to what your old games are worth, even if you don’t have a CeX near you. Now here’s the good part – GameStation will match their prices and beat them by £1 as long as you take a print out as proof. PC World also has a price match policy – find something cheaper within 30 miles of a PC World store they’ll reduce it by 10%.

Surf! Sites like HotUKDeals let members share their bargains with the World while Amazon Marketplace is far more efficient to buy second-hand games from than eBay. One top tip for Amazon is to change the search results to “Price: Low to High” – by doing so you can find stuff people have put on for literally pence. Another website I like to use now and then is US site SecondSpin that sells second-hand games for jolly nice prices and they re-shrink wrap them. They have free postage deals every couple of months but as mentioned earlier, be wary of customs.

If you shop regularly online then you may want to join Quidco too, and get cashback on some of your purchases. A lot of people swear by it. But not in a foul-mouthed way.

A few weeks back I pre-ordered Transformers 2 (on Xbox 360, if you’re wondering) from GAME for a nice £29.99. On Monday I got an e-mail saying that the order was being processed. Today (Wednesday) I get an e-mail from them saying that the order “cannot be fulfilled on this occasion” and that I’d have to re-order.

My knee-jerk reaction was that they couldn’t take payment from my card, so I called my bank – GAME hadn’t even tried to take a payment. I then phoned GAME, who after putting me on hold for ages, tell me that it was cancelled due the order failing a “security check”. I pointed out that the Transformers 2 is now showing at £39.99 on their site and asked if re-ordered could I get it for the original £29.99 asking price. Their answer? A rather abrupt “no”.

Screw that. GAME can kiss my arse if they think they’re going to get an extra tenner out of me just because of some failed “security check”. The lady on the phone couldn’t even tell me any more information on what this check entails. I reckon they just didn’t want it to go through at the cheaper price.

HMV or Blockbusters can have my money instead. Or maybe Morrisons, who seem to have some decent prices on games now and then.

UK Charts

Ghostbusters: The Video Game hasn’t been able to shove Prototype and The Sims 3 from the top two positions of the chart. It makes you wonder – if it had been released on all formats at once as planned then maybe would gone straight to #1? Instead it settles for #4, under Wii Fit. In the single formats Ghostbusters goes in at #1 in the PlayStation 3 chart and a somewhat bizarre #5 in the PlayStation 2 chart under the likes of Ben 10 and FIFA 09.

The only other new entry in the chart is PC thing Arma II at #19. Indiana Jones and the Staff of Kings is doing a bit better in its second week of release though, up from #32 to #13. In the PSP chart Rock Band Unplugged plugs in at #3 while in the Wii chart Sega’s Let’s Tap goes in at a respectable #14. It has even managed to outsell MySims Racing which goes in at #16. Now there’s a thing.

After months of delays, you can finally call (read: buy) Ghosbusters. That’s as long as you own a PlayStation 2 or PlayStation 3 as the Wii, DS and Xbox 360 versions aren’t officially out until autumn. I used the word officially there because the Xbox 360 and DS versions are both region free. GameHubs are doing it on Xbox 360 for a nice £31.99. Reviews have been positive (mostly 7s and 8s) but they do point out that it’s a bit rough in places. Still, when you get to weld a proton pack and fight the Staypuft Marshmallow Man who care about a few glitches and design faults?

Sony isn’t letting the PlayStation 2 slip away just yet either. As well as Ghostbusters – which is different to the PlayStation 3 version, being more cartoony – WipEout Pulse and Secret Agent Clank are out. They’re both conversions of PSP games and under twenty quid a pop. I wish they had converted God of War: Chains of Olympus instead of Secret Agent Clank.

On Wii there’s two from Sega – Virtua Tennis 2009 (available with or without MotionPlus) and the quirky, not to mention budget priced, Let’s Tap. MySims Racing isn’t meant to be too bad, and could do alright in the charts next week.

The only game out for Xbox 360 this week may (or may not) be Hail to the Chimp which has been stuck in limbo for a good year. It actually started out as a game for the original Xbox, which shows how troubled its life has been. US reviews weren’t too shabby though.

Next week: Another Code: R, Fight Night Round 4, Guitar Hero On Tour: Modern Hits, Guitar Hero: Greatest Hits, Transformers 2, Overlord 2 and Ice Age 3: Dawn of the Dinosaurs.

The jury is still out if the Xbox 360-exclusive Splinter Cell: Conviction is going to be any good or not. With over two years of development behind it, it should be nothing short of brilliant. But then again, the amount of delays that it’s had is more than worrying. Even if it does turn out to be pap then Game’s rather nifty pre-order deal should soften the blow.

According to an advert in 360 Gamer magazine this month (the deal isn’t on Game’s website yet) when you pre-order you get a comic book, bonus DVD and – now this is the good bit – a code to download Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory for free. Seeing that Xbox Originals cost something stupid like £10.60 to download that isn’t a bad freebie.

There will also be a limited edition version with a Sam Fisher figurine, that you’ll no doubt look at once then stick on your game shelf to collect dust.

British games developer Midway Newcastle (hello Steven Pick) is in a bit of a pickle. Whilst Midway are being bought up by Warner Bros, the little Newcastle studio hasn’t been included in the deal, leaving it with just two weeks to find a buyer, or else…

In an effort to flaunt their wares, the developers have pulled out their new title, Necessary Force, a Max Payne meets Sin City affair, set in a stylised American city. Of course, the game’s release does depend somewhat on the studio finding a buyer to fund the project.

Good luck Geordie Midway guys. If you know someone with a spare million or ten, why not suggest the studio as an ideal gift. Won’t someone please think of the developers?

UK Charts

Prototype fails to knock The Sims 3 off the top of this week’s top 40 chart, having to settle for #2 instead. Red Faction: Guerrila moves down to #3 followed by Wii Fit and UFC: Undisputed. Call of Duty: World at War is back up from #16 to #7 while iNfamous drops from #6 to #9. The rubbish Terminator Salvation is now out of the top 10, going from #10 to #16. Thank flip for that.

Grand Slam Tennis is the next new entry at #13, followed by Indiana Jones and The Staff of Kings at a rather low #32. Walk With Me on DS walks in at #39. Fuel is the biggest faller this week going from #12 to #24. And as noted last week, Resident Evil 5 has now left the top 40 entirely.

It looks like it’s the Wii version of Indiana Jones that’s the most popular – it’s in at #8 in the Wii chart, outselling Punch Out!! and Boom Blox 2: Bash Party which are at #16 and #14 respectively.

PR companies do some bizarre things to promote their games. It was only last month that Edinburgh Zoo renamed the UK’s sole wolverine to Logan to “celebrate” the release of X-Men Origins: Wolverine. THQ can top this – to get Red Faction Guerrilla in the public’s eye they packed a car with 100 copies of the game, chained a sledgehammer to it, and waited to see what happened.

Obviously, you can guess. Apparently though not everybody was interested in taking a copy of the game home – some just gave the car a whack and walked away.

I think it’s a bit surprising that nobody was around to hand out goggles. What if somebody took a blow to the windscreen and ended up with glass in their face? That would be a PR nightmare!

If you’re thinking that releasing Wolfenstein 3D on Xbox Live Arcade after both Doom and Duke Nuke’em 3D is a backwards way of doing things then you’d be right. Activision haven’t even bothered to tidy up the visuals, which is a bit of a cheek seeing that both the 3DO and Atari Jaguar versions had redrawn sprites. But this isn’t a complete waste of 400 Microsoft points, and for three good reasons.

1) Making progress through the castle unlocks new weapons and credits to use in the new Wolfenstein game that’s due out at the end of the year. Just keep hold of the save file until it’s released.

2) There’s a degree of nostalgia to be had. This is as primitive as first person shooters get – everything takes place on one level (so no stairs, basements, etc) but ID still managed some decent level design. The sound effects were advanced for their time too – the Nazi guards shout out in German and the weapons sound rather meaty.

3) The achievements are pretty easy to unlock. In fact, you can get a not-to-be-sniffed at 70G by finishing the first level. That’s providing you do it on the hardest difficulty, killing every enemy, finding a secret room and collecting all the treasure along the way.

Of course, there are much better ways of blowing 400 Microsoft Points. Worms and Zuma come to mind. I guess it depends if you have fond memories of playing this in way back in 1992 or not. I think I was probably too busy playing Sonic 2 on the Master System.