GOG.com

[A_boring_GOG_bot]

Don't do it, the game strives to imitate both Asscreed and GTA and comes out this weird bastard that is nowhere near fun as either of those. Furthermore, the gameplay is lacking consisting of a handful of story missions then 4000 thousand targets to blow up with little reason to do so as the game gets even easier and you should have acquired all the character upgrades and all the money you could use after the first couple hundred demolitions. The only people I could recommend the game to are those who enjoyed a similar albeit more involved experience in Just Cause or something.

The novelty of the setting and gameplay wears off fast. I suppose if you get the game super cheap go ahead just be advised if you're getting tired of it it's not going to get any better. Scratch that just go play Mafia 1 or something for an enjoyable experience.

It doesn't wear off that fast, it's still mostly enjoyable.

this on the other hand is true.

The saboteur was really crippled by consoles at the time, originally it had flyable planes but they couldn't get the content to stream fast enough on consoles so they axed them entirely. Missions taking place at the airbase really screamed you normally escape from here in a plane. Probably would have been nice to have some aerial races in addition to limited amount of automobile ones.

Thanks .

 

[A_boring_GOG_bot]

I'm currently browsing the catalogue on the website but i have a bad eyesight .

So the off- topic question :

Is the text easily readeble / the GUI scalable in these games on 1920x1080 scree resolution ?

Age of Decadence + Dungeon Rats
Avadom series
Avernum series
Balrum
Darkest Dungeon + DLCs
Deep Sky Derelicts
Din's Curse + DLC
DROD series
NEO Scavenger
Serpent in the Staglands
Subterrain
Sunless Sea + DLC
Tales of Maj'Eyal + DLCs
UnderRail
Zombasite + DLC

 

[sullynathan]

The saboteur was really crippled by consoles at the time, originally it had flyable planes but they couldn't get the content to stream fast enough on consoles so they axed them entirely. Missions taking place at the airbase really screamed you normally escape from here in a plane. Probably would have been nice to have some aerial races in addition to limited amount of automobile ones.

Wait how is consoles their reasoning? GTA, Just Cause & Saint's Row games that released before and after the saboteur (on the exact same consoles) had planes and everything you mentioned in them.

 

[Modron]

They just chose to axe them instead of downgrading everything else so they could get it streaming fast enough on consoles would be my guess. I don't know the particulars just the reason why. Not every game has the exact same optimization, codebase, engine, et cetera.

 

[Vorark]

I'm currently browsing the catalogue on the website but i have a bad eyesight .

So the off- topic question :

Is the text easily readeble / the GUI scalable in these games on 1920x1080 scree resolution ?

Age of Decadence + Dungeon Rats -> didn't have any problems
Avadom series
Avernum series
Balrum
Darkest Dungeon + DLCs
Deep Sky Derelicts
Din's Curse + DLC
DROD series
NEO Scavenger
Serpent in the Staglands
Subterrain
Sunless Sea + DLC
Tales of Maj'Eyal + DLCs
UnderRail
Zombasite + DLC

I didn't have any problems reading the text in Age of Decadence, NEO Scavenger and Underrail. Unfortunately Serpent in the Staglands uses a godawful pixelated font which is hard on the eyes and makes the game unplayable.

Never played the other games so no idea.

 

[A_boring_GOG_bot]

I'm currently browsing the catalogue on the website but i have a bad eyesight .

So the off- topic question :

Is the text easily readeble / the GUI scalable in these games on 1920x1080 scree resolution ?

Age of Decadence + Dungeon Rats -> didn't have any problems
Avadom series
Avernum series
Balrum
Darkest Dungeon + DLCs
Deep Sky Derelicts
Din's Curse + DLC
DROD series
NEO Scavenger
Serpent in the Staglands
Subterrain
Sunless Sea + DLC
Tales of Maj'Eyal + DLCs
UnderRail
Zombasite + DLC

I didn't have any problems reading the text in Age of Decadence, NEO Scavenger and Underrail. Unfortunately Serpent in the Staglands uses a godawful pixelated font which is hard on the eyes and makes the game unplayable.

Never played the other games so no idea.

Thanks .

 

[Endemic]

Xseed games on sale: https://af.gog.com/promo/20190104_weekend_promo_xseed?as=1649904300

 

[Dux]

Oh how I wish for the pre-2000 search filter again.

 

[Astral Rag]

The Citizen Kane of adventure games, Mystery of the Druids is currently on sale for €1.39

Every gamer needs to experience this masterpiece.

Spoiler

 

[Azalin]

The Citizen Kane of adventure games, Mystery of the Druids is currently on sale for €1.39

Isn't Jack Keane 2 aka Citizen Keane the Citizen Kane of adventures?

 

[Astral Rag]

The Citizen Kane of adventure games, Mystery of the Druids is currently on sale for €1.39

Isn't Jack Keane 2 aka Citizen Keane the Citizen Kane of adventures?

Haven't played that one yet but I do own it on gog, for some reason..

 

[Astral Rag]

This reminds me of that remark Christopher Moltisanti made about the 50 Cent movie:

I got the 50 Cent movie. They were giving them away at the car wash. Or something along those lines.

 

[Cerulean]

Christmas sale 2013, when this stupid game clogged up the entire works for hours, even with just 100 copies to sell.

I will never, ever forget.

 

[Ismaul]

Cerulean That was your moment to be a hero, man. To grab that last copy and help out a bunch of people browsing GOG. All that for 12$.

The tragedy is not that you waited so long. It's that you waited so long yet did nothing, your potential laying there unachieved.

 

[Cerulean]

Cerulean That was your moment to be a hero, man. To grab that last copy and help out a bunch of people browsing GOG. All that for 12$.

The tragedy is not that you waited so long. It's that you waited so long yet did nothing, your potential laying there unachieved.

But I'm no hero. The customers of GOG with 2000+ games in their account, with cash to burn on games they will never, ever play, they are the real heroes.

And as for that man who bought that last copy of Jack Keane 2... He's out there, somewhere, watching over us, keeping sales moving along. He's the hero that GOG deserves.

A silent Guardian.

A watchful Protector.

GOG's Dark Knight.

 

[Azalin]

Christmas sale 2013, when this stupid game clogged up the entire works for hours, even with just 100 copies to sell.

I will never, ever forget.

Don't forget the best part,after a few hours that nobody was buying any copies of that game people started posting 5/5 GOTY reviews on the site so that it's review average would increase and someone would be tricked into buying it

Saved My Life

November 14, 2013

I was sucking on the barrel of a gun, weeping, when I came upon this gem of a game. "One last game," I told myself, "one last moment of life before I pull the trigger." What a moment of life that was. Jack King 2: The Fist Within rekindled my passion for life and gaming. I then sold my gun and used the new funds to buy copies for all of my family, and they liked the gift so much that they came to accept and love me regardless of my condition. I give it 5/5 or 9/10, it is my personal game of the year all years.

The Tenth Wonder of the World

December 10, 2013

This game can only be compared to the light of god. I have wanted to see the Aurora Borealis my entire life but no longer desire to, as nothing can compare to the first playthrough of Jack Keane 2: The Fire within. It was as if I had accomplished everything I’ve ever wanted to accomplish, and I could live freely and happy for the rest of my life. I’ve been thinking about painting the moment to memorialize the liberation so that the unfortunate few that haven't experienced the pure bliss could bask in its greatness, but I believe it would be to beautiful for human eyes to view. It's a modern marvel of fiction, and beyond any doubt a new era of interactive media will open it's doors to reveal a new and bright future ahead of us. Thank you Jack Keane. May your name be etched in the hardest of stones and be remembered as your golden throne will remained unclaimed for millennia

Literally, Objectively Perfect

November 13, 2013

Jack Kanini: The Angry Fires is the greatest game any plane of existence has ever had the absolute pleasure to bear witness to. With a story crafted delicately from the collective hearts of all of humankind, and a few primates, there is absolutely no reason why you should not purchase exactly 57 copies of this beautiful game that has been handed to us on a golden platter by God himself.


Citizen Keane

November 14, 2013

Some games might be the Citizen Kane of gaming, but Citizen Kane is the Jack Keane of films. It's on a whole different level from all that has come before.

Ambrosia.

November 13, 2013 Verified owner

My vision was bad, I had aches and pains, and my skin wasn't that great. Because of this game, I am not only free of all of those problems, but I have also grown beyond human limitations. Now I can float above the clouds and look beyond the beautiful horizon. All that was ugly is now so pretty, I can cry. The game itself- it is indescribable. I simply have no words. I am lost when I think of it....

 

[Endemic]

Midweek adventure games sale: https://af.gog.com/promo/20190116_midweek_sale?as=1649904300

 

[Scruffy]

I strongly suggest buying Post Mortem and Still Life if you don't have them

 

[Infinitron]

The fate of Dune 2:

But there was this one guy who knew about the case because he was personally interested and he said that all the rights had reverted to Frank Herbert’s family.

Somehow, I don’t want to know how, one colleague got a contact for them, and they unfortunately said they didn't want to revive anything. It wasn’t a case of not understanding games, just a straight-up, ‘If it’s old it should stay old’. It was so unbelievably frustrating.

https://www.pcgamer.com/gogs-10-year-journey-to-bring-old-games-back-to-life/

GOG's 10 year journey to bring old games back to life
An oral history of Good Old Games: How it began, and how they track down classic games and make them work again.

10 years ago, not long after a young CD Projekt had founded a development studio and released The Witcher, the company founded something else: GOG.com. Back then, though, GOG wasn't just GOG. It was Good Old Games, a new digital store aimed at selling only old games. So much has changed about the way we buy and play games in that decade, it's hard to remember that that was, in 2008, a strange idea.

Digital distribution is now normal. DRM-free games are pretty normal, too, and so is selling classic games. But GOG had to be pioneer these concepts as its inexperienced team of upstarts from Eastern Europe built a platform, convinced developers and publishers to join them, learned to become IP rights detectives, and figured out how to make old software run on new hardware.

This is the story of how Good Old Games began, and how GOG today tracks down classic games and makes them work again, in the words of some of GOG's key players.

Good old days
When GOG managing director Piotr Karwowski started working at CD Projekt as a web designer 20 years ago, they faced a serious problem: game piracy in Poland was rife.

Piotr Karwowski: In the early 2000s, before CD Projekt got into game development, we were distributing games in boxes. Piracy in Poland was a big issue, but what were immensely popular were rereleases of classics in a mid-price format, where in one box you could find Baldur’s Gate 1 and 2, Icewind Dale and Planescape Torment all for $15, packed with maps. It was all about focusing on value to fight piracy, and also making it hassle free, with no activations so it worked out of the box.

Years later, as digital distribution rose, CD Projekt founders Marcin Iwiński and Michał Kiciński saw potential in using what they’d learned in fighting piracy for something new.

Piotr Karwowski: I learned of the idea for GOG sometime in March 2007. I met with Michał Kiciński and he said he had this cool idea and asked if I could kick start it somehow. The idea was on a post-it note with just four points: ’two price-points’, ’DRM-free’, ’simple user experience’, ‘classics’. There was no grand scheme for how we’d do it. I felt a bit scared. I had no idea how we’d do it.

Many challenges lay ahead. One was convincing publishers and developers that the project would work. Oleg Klapovsky is GOG’s senior vice president of bizdev and operations, and was the first person to start trying to do just that.

Oleg Klapovsky: The reaction was always different. Initially they just didn’t understand what we wanted to do. Then some publishers looked at us and said, ‘Hey, you guys are crazy. You won’t make any money out of it.’ Others asked us how we’d make the games work, because they didn’t have masters for them. They were worried that it’d take lots of their time, but it wasn’t the case. We did everything ourselves, and we had a motto: ‘The only thing you need to do is write your signature and then send us invoices.’

There was also the challenge of building a platform that would look nice, work smoothly for users, and could serve terabytes of data on an international scale.

Piotr Karwowski: Back then there were no cloud services and the people we hired had no experience of digital distribution. We had to figure out how to get it to work. And I know this will sound counterintuitive but I think it was the biggest blessing for GOG. We believed it could be done. I’m pretty sure that if we had industry veterans on the team, they’d have told us to drop the whole idea, but we were naive and it worked. There’s a Terry Pratchett quote I love dearly, which goes, ‘The vital ingredient of success is not knowing that what you attempt cannot be done.’

Over the course of 2007, GOG the platform was steadily built, and everyone at CD Projekt loved it. But there was a problem. GOG didn't have any games to sell.

Piotr Karwowski: As a distributor, CD Projekt knew a lot of companies [like] Ubisoft and Blizzard, so we were certain they’d agree. I mean, their games were pirated anyway! But it proved not to be so easy. The holy grail to find a company to sign up took seven or eight months; we knocked on every door. No one wanted to be first.

Oleg Klapovsky: Interplay were different, because the only rights they had were rights for super-old games, and some of them weren’t sold anywhere. For Interplay, GOG was an easy deal because they couldn’t sell these titles anywhere else.

Marta Adamska: The signature took ages and at the end of the day they said, screw it, it’s old titles anyway, it’s going to be fine, and it was! Now they’re one of our awesome, awesome partners.

Spoiler

Getting the rights

Marta Adamska is head of bizdev at GOG, which entails a great deal of sleuthing to find the people who own the rights to classic games so GOG can sell them.

Marta Adamska: With classic titles, most rights are lost between companies, liquidation, bankruptcies, mergers and acquisitions. And it’s not always that obvious. Some agreements are written in a way where after a certain amount of time the rights revert to the developer. But the rights for what? The code? The IP? The character, the music? Actually, every one is separate. There are games where we’ve signed five-way agreements, and some rights went to one party and are blocked by another. It’s insanely complicated to track it all.

Often, the first step is to approach the original developers.

Marta Adamska: I come from the perspective that the creator is the one who is going to care most, and [is the] most likely to know where the rights remain. Then I go to the publisher, who has probably gone bankrupt. But nothing disappears when it comes to rights. They’re there somewhere, and someone must have inherited or acquired them. That was the case for the Forgotten Realms games. They were really difficult. They were journeys through pain, but Oleg managed to find all the people who were involved. He worked for years to make that happen.

Oleg Klapovsky: I was always a fan of the Eye of the Beholder games, and I always wondered who had the rights. People always told me that they were part of this merger and that acquisition, but when I checked I couldn’t find proof. I was talking a lot to Wizards of the Coast at the time, and I asked them, since it was their IP, if they knew who worked on it. They gave some hints and I started talking to some producers and ex-owners and slowly, step-by-step, we came to a company that has nothing to do with games nowadays that just had all these old titles lying around. They’d forgotten about them!

We asked if they were willing to make a deal, and it took one or two years, explaining that we’re not some shady company. We were surprised by what we found there, including the rights for the code to the Forgotten Realms games! I thought they’d gone to Ubisoft.

But not everyone sees the appeal of bringing old games back from limbo.

Marta Adamska: With one game, I can’t say which, we found all the rights had reverted to the developer. We found him and one of the team added him on LinkedIn, but there was no reply. We looked through forums, and through some weird old website found his email address and wrote to him. But his daughter replied and sadly, she said he’d died five years ago. We said we’d love to release the game, and she had no clue about games whatsoever. I guess for her it was too high a barrier in terms of understanding what it was all about.

Then there were the Dune games. We’d all love to see Dune II come back, right?

Marta Adamska: Oh my god, we’ve spoken to so many people who were even remotely engaged in the process of creating Dune II. Westwood was involved and as it turned out, not all the rights went to EA when they bought them. Some code rights went to some of the actual programmers, but they were residual so we’d need to sign with both them and EA. Talking to EA is always a huge process because they’re such a huge company. Asking for the documents, which are in paper form, that’s a level of time and engagement that might not be worth it in terms of business. But there was this one guy who knew about the case because he was personally interested and he said that all the rights had reverted to Frank Herbert’s family.

Somehow, I don’t want to know how, one colleague got a contact for them, and they unfortunately said they didn't want to revive anything. It wasn’t a case of not understanding games, just a straight-up, ‘If it’s old it should stay old’. It was so unbelievably frustrating. But of course, they have a right to that decision. It’s theirs. If they feel so strongly, who are we to judge them for it?

Oleg Klapovsky: Unfortunately, Dune, even though it’s one of my most loved titles, never worked out. But we keep chasing everything on the list, once a year or every two years. We don’t give up on any title; it’s just a matter of how regularly we chase, and maybe one day something will happen.

Marta Adamska: We revisit these situations once a year or six months, because maybe it wasn’t a good moment. Maybe we caught the daughter of that developer by surprise. We’ll send her some articles about classic games, show her how happy people are. I’m hoping that’s going to work.

Old games reborn
Once a game has has finally been signed, it’s down to GOG’s head of product, Marcin Paczynski, and his team to get it ready to release.

Marcin Paczynski: I was hired in March 2009 as a tester. I was told, hey, this is your PC, and your first game to test is Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. We will be releasing it in two days, so just play it for a few hours. That was my job! So it started with pretty good game. But then I played games like Crystals of Aborea, an Ishar RPG, where there’s no map. Those games were very difficult! Very, very annoying at times. I was the newest guy, so the best titles were given to the others. Then I got to enjoy those games. Being forced to do it, I started to see why they’re considered classics.

Getting old games working on modern Windows systems is often difficult. For the oldest, GOG’s biggest weapon is the DOS emulator DOSBox. One of its core developers, Peter ‘Qbix’ Veenstra, frequently helps out.

Marcin Paczynski: Most of the time all we get is email with a title and a contact person, and that’s basically it. With Harvester there were a lot of issues with how its movies are displayed. Qbix was helping us but we couldn’t find the correct codec. It was randomly happening across the whole game, and every time a tester came up to a new problem, we’d try a different codec and have to start the game all over again. Even the last outro movie went wrong, so we needed to go back to square one right at the end.

Many games don’t work perfectly in vanilla DOSBox. GOG has to fiddle with many settings, including scaling, controller setups and CPU cycles, sometimes having to dynamically set them because different parts of a game behave differently.

Marcin Paczynski: For Theme Park we had to ask Qbix to create a separate branch of DOSBox. The game was all over the place, it didn’t work at all. The biggest problem was with memory allocation. We had previous problems with Realms of Arkania, where the last boss was basically unbeatable because of the memory allocation issue. But there are games that are much more difficult, and those are the early Windows games. Here is where we have the majority of the fun, so to speak.

After all, before DirectX 9 was released in 2002, there were few standards for PC hardware and software.

Marcin Paczynski: A game is like a Pandora’s box. You open it and it can be all over the place. When we first launched Jedi Knight: Mysteries of the Sith, the game is 3D but the land was 2D and there were no textures. Everything was white. It wasn’t crashing, but it was totally unplayable. It can take a couple of months to be able to release those games.

Marta Adamska: Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine was completely not compatible with new operating systems, and our product team had to rebuild it to make it run on Win 7, 8 and 10… without having the source code. We actually added cloud saves to that one as well, so it’s a fairly modern experience now.

Marcin Paczynski: One of the problems we had with Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine, and this is one of the reasons we do full playthroughs from beginning to the end, was that at the very end, an elevator that’s supposed to take the player to the next level was gone. At first, we thought it was caused by one of our fixes, but it turned out that it was a known bug and the only workaround is to restart the chapter until it works, or to find a saved game where the elevator is present. We were able to fix it.

GOG's team isn't the only one reworking PC games to get them running again. Many game fans have gathered community fixes and patches over the years, and their makers are almost always happy to help.

Marcin Paczynski: The game is their passion as it is ours, so they love the idea that the game is kind of immortalised on GOG. It’s under our official care, and we commit for it to work in years to come. But that being said, we are not always able to use community fixes because they can change how the game behaves, and it’s very important for us to maintain the original experience. We discuss whether to fix something or whether it’s basically how the game is remembered. I don’t want to mention any titles but we have some famously broken games on GOG, and it’s a part of preserving their history if a character levitates in a cutscene or something. That means we create our own fixes, but we make sure that our version of the game is compatible with what the community has created.

For Oblivion we directly contacted the community, in particular the creators of script extenders, because they had to be created specifically for our version. Before the game was released we supplied them with our build so at launch they were compatible.

Getting a game on to GOG is tremendously complex, sometimes taking years of detective work, negotiation and technical wizardry. It’s hard to see all that from the outside, where all you see is the storefront.

Piotr Karwowski: We wanted it to be as good a platform as possible so that the first impression people would have was positive. It’s a crazy platform from Eastern Europe, and it couldn’t look like some scamming site.

Marcin Paczynski: People ask us things like, ‘Why don’t you have Diablo? What the hell guys, what are you doing?’ Before I joined GOG I was like that, too. It seemed simple, I could buy these games in my local store, so why couldn’t I buy them on GOG? It didn’t make sense, but it turns out that it’s much more complicated than it seems.

GOG released Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine as part of its 10th anniversary celebration in October 2018, alongside famously graphic shooter Soldier of Fortune. Around the same time it also faced widespread criticism for a social media post for the the second time that year. GOG deleted the tweet and issued a statement that it "GOG should focus only on games. We acknowledge that and we commit to it." It later fired the community manager behind those tweets.

Today GOG's store features many new games side-by-side with old ones, and it continues to add more classics. In the past few months, those additions have included Flashback and Gekido: Kintaro's Revenge (originally on the Game Boy Advance!).

 

[Unkillable Cat]

The fate of Dune 2:

But there was this one guy who knew about the case because he was personally interested and he said that all the rights had reverted to Frank Herbert’s family.

Somehow, I don’t want to know how, one colleague got a contact for them, and they unfortunately said they didn't want to revive anything. It wasn’t a case of not understanding games, just a straight-up, ‘If it’s old it should stay old’. It was so unbelievably frustrating.

Does this mean they're gonna let the Dune franchise die out in its entirety? It is old, after all.

 

[Endemic]

Another mini-sale: https://af.gog.com/promo/20190118_weekend_sale?as=1649904300

 

[Baron Dupek]

Brothers in Arms trilogy available, with -50% discount

 

[zapotec]

Midweek adventure games sale: https://af.gog.com/promo/20190116_midweek_sale?as=1649904300

I bought the two blackguards
how they compare, for example, against the realms of arkania remake?

 

[Modron]

Blackguards 1 was really good the second was okay enough, so quite favorably.

 

[deuxhero]

I don't get how people can dismiss offers due to not understanding video games. There's nothing game specific here, it's exactly the same as if they owned the rights to an old book or film. You own this IP, someone wants to rerelease it, if you agree you'll get paid and lose nothing but the ability to accept other bids (which don't exist). Agree, get a few thousand dollars and fix your car/get a new TV/pay off your debt/whatever and be done with it.