Rock, Paper, Shotgun

The chaps at GoG.com have offered to sponsor our forum relaunch with a little competition. It’s going to work like this: we want you to go to this thread and post a capsule review of any game you like. It has to be shorter than one-hundred words, but can otherwise take on any format. The funniest, cleverest, and most inventive ten review authors – as decided by the RPS team – will each get to choose any single game from the GoG.com line-up (The Witcher 2 excluded).

You’ve got until Midday UK time on Monday. Go.

Hrm. So there’s something going on over at DRM-free digital distribution site GoG.com. The site is down, and in its place a message that, in part, reads: “We have recently had to give serious thought to whether we could really keep GOG.com the way it is. We’ve debated on it for quite some time and, unfortunately, we’ve decided that GOG.com simply cannot remain in its current form.” (And the message seems to have changed since I read it earlier, which is interesting.)

However, it’s not necessarily over, and there will be a solution for everyone to download their games. We contacted the GoG team and received this message: “As the message on the site says, this doesn’t mean GOG is gone. We’ll have more to share in the coming days.” So we wait and see. My guess? They’ll be assimilated into another digital distribution system, something like that.

EDIT: This unfortunately-timed Bit-tech article is worth a read.

Everyone loves a giant sale. How else are you supposed to get your giants cheap?! Ahahaha! Oh, that was good. Hey, remember that time I did the giant sale joke?

In other news, Good Old Games is having a great offer this weekend. There’s a 50% discount on the Rebellion pack, which’ll give you (deep breath) Evil Genius, Empire Earth Gold, Empire Earth 2 Gold, Empire Earth 3, Ground Control + its expansion, Ground Control 2: Operation Exodus, Judge Dredd: Dredd Vs. Death, Lords of Magic Special Edition, Lords of the Realm Royal Edition, Lords of the Realm 3, and Republic: The Revolution, all for $40.89.

If you already bought any of the games in that collection, you’ll still get 50% off the rest of them if you complete the pack, or 30% off only some of them. This continues until Tuesday morning, and seems a decent way to get a big pile of interesting games.

Digital distribution’s a funny bugger – it’s growing ever harder to predict and apply patterns to it. One day, a new videogame from Steam et al is more expensive than its boxed-copy counter-part, then a few weeks later it can be selling for next-to-nothing. The Steam Christmas sale is almost unreal in both the amount and extent of its discounts, and it’s going to be having Valve’s competitors howling with despair. Honestly: some of these deals are yer-actual-genuine-proper-mental. Today only: Mirror’s Edge is £3.24, GTA IV is £5. In general over the seasonal shakedown: Braid is £1.74, Medieval II: Total War is £2.50, Ghostbusters is £5, Batman’s £20… And dozens and dozens more. Of course, there are sales on at the other major download services too..

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When Chris SmallGods mailed me about this, I was determined to post about it. Primarily… well, to cover old sins, really. Not that I ever reviewed it – Sanitarium only was released when I first inched into Staffwriterdom – but it was pretty much ignored and/or brutalised by the British games press, and slowly climbed to a cult-status ever since. It’s basically – if you squint – John the Baptist to Planescape Torment’s Jesus Christ in terms of the failure of UK critical response of the period. Anyway – this psychological adventure game is now available on GoG. I’ve never played it, but – from what I’ve had grasped from God knows how many conversations about it from friends – that it’s basically Psychonauts if the designers didn’t find anything funny about mental illness. The examination of Lucasart’s influence on the adventure is manifold… but in reducing suitable topics for adventure games to “gags” if probably the most noticeable, were I to be critical.

Anyone played it? Do you think it’s still worth playing? And similar! The ever-handy youtube Footage follows…
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Any excuse to post about The Longest Journey. That’s my motto. And this is quite a good one. Good Old Games are putting emphasis on that first G today with the addition of one of time’s finest adventures (and the game that’s most important to me) to their catalogue. It is of course also available on other download sites, but getting it via GoG means it’s DRM free, and it turns out, cheaper (just)! Hooray (just)! If you’re in the right country! TLJ is currently £5.99/9.99€/$9.99 on Steam. Via GoG it’s $9.99, which translates to £5.45 in the UK, but for our European allies it plummets to 6.11€. If you want to know more about the game, and why it’s so damned special, there’s a million squillion things to read about it on this site. If you haven’t played it yet, I hate you. But I’m prepared to forgive you.

Update: cheaper Ground Control bundle here, but only for Britons.

Quite a few people sent in comments about classic, resource-free, 3D real time strategy Ground Control being on GoG.com. It’s interesting to see the game up there for a number of reasons, not least because the original game was actually freely distributed by Vivendi for quite some time. Of course with Vivendi disappearing into the ActiBlizzard merger there’s all kinds of funny things going on with the ownership of their games, their distribution and so on. Rebellion – the chaps who are making the new AvP game – now own Evil Genius, Ground Control, Empire Earth and Lords Of The Realm, and they’re distributing them via that aforementioned digital download service. I suspect a few of you will have something to say about all those games, but Ground Control was a particular love of mine, and I wanted to say a few things about the GoG bundle, and why it might actually still be worth a few dollars.

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At last – Good Old Games, the lovely, cheapie, DRM-free (DON’T SAY A BLOODY BORING WORD ABOUT BLOODY BORING DRM) download service specifically dedicated to olde worlde classics of PC gaming – and often out of print ones at that – has finally thrown open its doors to the whole wide world. It’s no longer a closed beta, but an open beta – by which it presumably means ‘actually launched but “beta” sounds cooler’. Nonetheless – woo!
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GI.biz has been talking to CD Projekt CEO Michal Kicinski, who reports that publishers are scared of using a DRM-free distribution system, despite cracked versions of their games being widely available on torrents. “DRM-free, that is something they are really scared of,” said Kicinski. “But on the other hand we can say ‘all of those games are available pirated widely so it’s better to sell them for small money than make the customer’s life difficult and get some more revenues’.”

The DRM-free product in question, of course, are the titles on CD Projekt’s digital distribution platform gog.com, which is currently in its closed early-access beta. We’re looking forward to this one going live.

Via VG247.

Everyone’s gotta have an online games store these days. One day, even we’ll have one, exclusively selling unplayable text adventures we made when we were nine, and the BBC Micro version of Manic Miner which I hacked to say that I wrote it.

Meantime, it’s Midway’s turn.
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