Free or not I’ll pass, this is clearly just Balder’s Gate with guns.”

As I assume this was a tongue in cheek “Oblivion with guns” reference – I had a good chuckle that ended with an annoyingly loud snort. People are staring at me…

I didn’t have to install any game tapp crap. Sign up for anything. Jump through any hoops. Nothing.

When does GOG.com go live? Will have to wait until then for my fix.

In regards to GoG, I peruse it frequently because I dig the forums (they actually talk about mods on their forums, which gives them an immediate Awesome Badge, because it’s fuelling mod communities for old games), and I have noticed that sometimes I simply can’t get in there.

I do think though that whenever this happens, it’s because they’re doing maintenance on the site and rolling out new features. It’s still in beta currently, so that’s probably the most likely explanation for the occasional outage. The point of this though was simply to say: don’t worry, you’re not the only one.

As for Fallout and GameTap, I didn’t want to say too much because I’m trying not to get myself painted as the local frothing anti-DRM tool in the way that Leonard Nimoy tried to avoid being painted as Spock, but like Spock, I think I’ve failed because I wanted to back you up on that.

GameTap does indeed keep things on a virtual hard disk, which is encrypted, the docs of nosey people are out there, if you want to have a peek, and it’s a tough thing to crack. Oh and don’t even dream of trying to poke around in there when you have a game running. I tried that twice and both times I experienced an unrecoverable lock-up, that was very fun.

Apparently, their software is that paranoid that it completely stalls the computer if the user starts poking around in the GameTap directory. GameTap crashing/closing, I could understand. But an unrecoverable lock-up? That’s just going a tad too far.

And it’s not like I don’t ready myself for lock-ups either, I’ve played plenty of unstable games, and more often than not I’ve wrestled my computer back to usefulness without a reboot, even when I’ve been told that it would be utterly impossible and hopeless to do so (it’s a gift). The GameTap lock though… it haunts me. That was one time I simply had to cut the power.

I suppose that some people will take me wrong with going on about how GameTap does that, but the thing is is that I actually really do like GameTap, I dig them and I think what they’re trying to do is great (bringing games to more people on an entirely reasonable budget, allowing those who aren’t made of money to enjoy a large selection of games). But I just realise they’re not for me.

I like to poke around, and I love to mod my games because I’ve pretty much had a 100 per cent success rate when it comes to mods making a game an eminently more enjoyable and polished experience (Media Molecule had something to say about that recently, too, and it was nice being verified by someone smarter than myself). So I like having mods in games, but you’re right and you’re not being stupid, it’s just not really possible to mod GameTap games. If you try to fiddle, you get your wrists slapped.

I’ve never had any troubles at all with GameTap if I didn’t try to fiddle though, so everything I did I brought upon myself.

One thing I wish GameTap would do is actually work with their community to figure out which are good mods for games that everyone would like and then roll out two versions of a game, vanilla and modded. That would actually make their free version very worthwhile, but with the mods out there now and how much they enhance a given game, running a game vanilla is just silly.

That’s why I too recommend paying 3 squids for the GoG.com Fallout if one has it lying around and cares about seeing what mods can do with a game. If one doesn’t give a damn about such things though… GameTap, definitely GameTap.

(Oh, and for those wondering. I had a US friend who let me borrow a sub-account, GameTap does no checking whatsoever for the locations of IPs. So once I had that I was able to check out their full software catalogue, watch their media, and even got to play Uru for free for a bit, too. I know, I’m a lucky bastard. If you have US friends with GameTap, pester them, it’s worth a look.)

“We apologize, but the GameTap service currently is available only in the United States and Canada. The GameTap service will be expanding into additional countries, but no release dates are available at this time”

Perhaps you’ve found a way to bypass the IP-based country check? I’d be rather interested in such a thing as I’d like to download the equally free Deus Ex…