Comments on: Holy Smoke: Infernal For Free

By: brulleks

brulleks — Sun, 10 May 2009 12:17:04 +0000

Cheers Dom. Looks like you were right – must have been a temporary glitch as I’ve just logged in with my old details again.

Now, if only I didn’t have a million other things to play as well… *sigh*

By: malkav11

malkav11 — Sat, 09 May 2009 03:11:32 +0000

Infernal may not be one of the games afflicted by that particular issue, I forget, but I -have- played it (through Gametap, actually) and it’s rather rubbish. So I’m more putting that out as a general warning for folks tempted by more excellent free titles.

By: damien

damien — Sat, 09 May 2009 02:22:03 +0000

ha! blather bob, thank you for the ini tweak and the steam link. (im an idiot, i was running around from d2d / gg and impulse because i was *sure* i’d seen it on offer at one of them). or rather, steam thanks you. ;)

By: Blather Blob

Blather Blob — Sat, 09 May 2009 01:17:33 +0000

@damien: If you don’t mind editing a few files and the registry, you can change the download location (the old client used to ask the location, and people who still had it installed got that setting transferred over. I believe there will eventually be a UI for setting this, but they’re still very busy getting the new system working for everybody again). If you want to buy it, there’s Steam for $10.

@malkav11: I haven’t tried Infernal, but it’s recent enough that it probably saves games to the My Documents folder. If that’s true, GameTap won’t suck them up and eat them. It only does that when saved directly in the game’s folder. Or at least, my My Documents folder is full of saved games for many of the games I’ve played on GameTap.

By: damien

damien — Fri, 08 May 2009 22:49:29 +0000

@blather bob re: sandboxie.

you can set up permissions for whole drives, or folders to either be used by sandboxie when sandboxie or a sandboxed program is run or to automatically run sandboxed by default at windows logon (like my \downloads\ directories). things can be installed out of them via settings + popups, but without user consent nothing “gets out” of a sandboxed directory or program that can alter a system.

it took me awhile to get used to it, but the trojan / worm nightmare i got back (after lending a thinkpad out to a friend for a few weeks) reminded me that its SO much better than the alternatives.

“what did you do? click every single flashing porn popup you could find???”

By: damien

damien — Fri, 08 May 2009 22:40:15 +0000

meh. i’m back to grumbling. this is probably a minor issue for everyone else who isn’t OCD about their system, so overall gametap is headed in the right direction…

BUT… it automatically downloads / installs games to your c:documents and settingsall usersapp data blah blah blah… directory.

on systems like mine, where windows is the *only* thing installed on my c drive, this is not-optimal. at least ask the user what drive he’d like this crap put on.

i played hitman – blood money for about an hour and then got grossed out at how the regular installing and deleting of throwaway “free” 3gb+ games on a regular basis is going to thrash my C drive all the time and just kinda gave up on it all.

anyone know of a direct-download place that sells infernal for the states?

By: malkav11

malkav11 — Fri, 08 May 2009 20:45:28 +0000

I don’t mind a time limit on the free play. But I must, must, must always have access to my save files.

By: Dominic White

Dominic White — Fri, 08 May 2009 20:40:17 +0000

The prospect of ‘free games’ seems to make people paranoid, it seems. I was talking with one of the guys who ran Gametap back when it was under Time-Warner, and apparently one of the biggest problems they had was getting people past that initial suspicion. A lot of folks would (despite the site being owned by one of Americas biggest media corporations) just assume that it’s shady and there’s hidden charges and/or spyware or whatever is the latest internet scare of the week attached.

By: Mister Yuck

Mister Yuck — Fri, 08 May 2009 20:30:44 +0000

You guys don’t just look a gift horse in the mouth, you get out your pliers and start with the amateur dentistry.

By: Blather Blob

Blather Blob — Fri, 08 May 2009 19:29:54 +0000

@damien: Just to be clear, I’m not saying I know of security holes in the plugin, I’m just worried that if it has any security holes by nature of it being a plugin they would be open to any page you browse to. Of course, I assume sandboxie will keep you safe (I haven’t looked at it before; can you configure which directories the plugin will have read/write access to, or does it present popups everytime you try to download a new game? Or, looking at the website’s description, does it “delete” the not-actually-written-to-the-real-HDD downloaded games when you close IE?), but most folks don’t take security so seriously as you, or assume running Firefox will fix the problems.

Oh, and I agree that a web-based UI is a much better idea than some custom 3D thing, it’s just too bad they have to create yet another custom plugin (not that I can suggest an alternative, other than a client that wraps an HTML engine for its UI). Oh, and I know what you mean about the grumpiness of the old client. On my Server 2008 install, it would only load when I was using WHQL-certified drivers (my GTX 260 doesn’t support 3D acceleration, you say?). And it then tried to help me by refusing to even download the Windows games into my data folder since I was running a 64-bit OS and they were incompatible, never mind that if they were downloaded I’d be able to restart into XP and then run them, without having to leave my computer on overnight running XP just to download games. And then when I uninstalled it from Server 2008 one time, it helpfully deleted all my downloaded games which had been shared with my XP install.

By: damien

damien — Fri, 08 May 2009 17:44:55 +0000

@ blather bob – i really hated all versions of gametap’s client in the past. when it did run, it was unattractive, very clumsy, used RAM poorly and just felt like a chore. it did itself even fewer favors by not running on any flavor of windows server and its inability to run on any of my older thinkpads (due to its window animations the program “needed” 32mb of VRAM to run). the old client turned what should have been the bliss of emulated dos or console games on a series of 1999 – 2001 era thinkpads into an “issue”.

i’ll get back to you and eat my words if the plug-in opens anything janky after i’ve nosed around it for a bit; but between sandboxie and my router i’m much more happy gametap actually works for me this time around than worried about potential security issues it might bring.

By: Blather Blob

Blather Blob — Fri, 08 May 2009 17:20:50 +0000

@Dominic: They’ve been slow with the rotation because they’ve been focused solely on trying to get the site working again for the past two months. But if you look at their forum thread of New and Upcoming Games, it lists those games as already overdue for removal from the free games, and that was when they last updated that list, about three weeks ago.

I’d warn anyone considering this that using GameTap now requires installing a browser plugin (IE and Firefox are supported) instead of the previous standalone client. Personally, I’m more leary of that than a client, considering the potential for exploits this opens when browsing the web. I get around it by being forced to use GameTap on a second OS install, since its DRM is 32-bit only, and I don’t really care what it does to the browser on that OS since I don’t use it for anything else anyway.