Getting your hands on retro (PC, obviously) games can be pretty tough nowadays. Remember those big cardboard boxes, containing 10 floppy disks and a huge poster printed on some cloth? If you buy a game today, you get a plastic DVD box with a tiny manual, sometimes even not colored. If you want more swag, you’ll need to buy the collector’s edition, which means things like on-line preordering to be sure you’ve got one of the limited printed boxes, and paying more than $10 extra. At this moment, ebay may offer a solution for you but most games are slightly damaged and more than overpriced.
CD Project offers a solution to the desperate retro gamer; a solution called “Good Old Games” (GOG). Essentially it’s a on-line webstore dedicated to retro and old PC games which are not that easy to find anymore, even in budget edition. You can subscribe to their service and for only $6 download the games. Of course you won’t have the goodies included either, but hey. The project is in open beta phase right now, so go to http://www.gog.com to try it! More information:
When it launches in September, CD Projekt’s Good Old Games will offer cheap, DRM-free digital downloads of long-lost old-school PC titles like Fallout, Fallout 2, Jagged Alliance 2, Sacrifice, Descent 1-3 and Kingpin: Life of Crime, among others.
Priced at either $5.99 or $9.99, these aren’t straight re-releases. CD Projekt has done work to ensure that each game is now compatible with Windows XP and Vista, going so far as to create a custom installer for each game. A closed public beta demonstrating this is set to go live on August 1, with the site currently accepting applications.
Read an interesting interview about piracy concerns and more at shacknews.
I’m getting fairly tired of defending Arcanum on various *cough, console lovers* message boards and against friends. Everybody seems to prefer Oblivion-style Roleplaying gameplay mechanics. Fine by me, but don’t try to piss RPG Codex members and me off by complaining about the bug fest in Troika’s games. During my more than 5 playthroughs (admittedly never got to the finish, fooling around with different characters is even funnier), I never encountered a single “bug“. Except the obvious not-so-finished questlines in later stages of the game. Point the finger to the publishers, not to Troika.
Because, in Arcanum, everybody reacts on everything in a unique way. No NPC interactions are scripted (as seen in the NPC Interaction tests)! This makes debugging a more than difficult task of course. Read the interview for details. Here’s the most important part, carefully preserved for future quotage:
- nubs
I am convinced, after playing the game a few times, that the most consistently powerful party...
- Jefklak
I’ve also found the bishop to be one of the best and most powerful classes to use :)...
- angel
The best party you can have in this game, and trust me I have played with a lot of kind of...
- hadjer
je veux jouer avec claw si c’est possible et merçi
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