14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft is improving the Games on Demand service it provides for Windows PCs. The distribution platform will start getting video games from 2K, Capcom, Rockstar, THQ and Ubisoft even if they are not branded with the Games for Windows Live logo on the same day they come out in brick-and-mortar stores. New releases will come every week from now on and the company promises that more than 100 games will be available until the end of the year.
One of these new titles that will grace Microsoft's digital store is Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands. To celebrate it, the Redmond company is offering the first two games in the series, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time and Prince of Persia: Warrior Within, for 200 Microsoft Points, that is 2.5 dollars, 75 percent of the initial price.
Other new non-Live titles that can be purchased and downloaded now from Games on Demand for Windows are Age of Empires III, Assassin’s Creed 2, Borderlands, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne, Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Conviction and S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Shadow of Chernobyl.
Most of the games on this list are well known. Splinter Cell: Conviction is the latest entry in Ubisoft 's critically acclaimed stealth series and it changes the pace set by the old titles, focusing more on the action than on subtlety. It is priced at 60 dollars. S.T.A.L.K.E.R is first-person shooter developed by the Ukrainian GSC Game World and it allows the player to explore a quarantined zone around the meltdown of the Chernobyl Nuclear Plant. The radiation created a lot of strange phenomena, from mutants to various anomalies that defy the laws of physics. The anomalies generate a series of artifacts that are worth a lot of money in the outside world and this results in the area being populated with a number of treasure hunters called Stalkers.