Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Once upon a time this platform game came out that no one cared about. Mark Donald was the editor of PC Gamer at the time, and it was given to me because it came from that guy who used to do adventure games, and I’m the adventure game guy. It was down on the magazine’s flatplan for a page. Psychonauts or something. Not knowing anything about it, and with absolutely no PR foretelling us about it, I installed it with confused expectations. Within a couple of hours I called Donald and said, “This needs more than a page.” By the next day I had bargained it up to four pages. Which was all the space they had left. Psychonauts was something special. And is now available for $10 on Good Old Games.

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It’s always fun to see what relics will appear on Good Old Games next. Plundering the PC gaming archives, they pull out a Duke Nukem 3D or a Stonekeep, and suddenly you’re back in the mid 90s, the blocky graphics and absence of physics are immediately forgotten, and you’re having a damned great time. And then there’s MegaRace. It’s fascinating to see it appearing – one of the most famously terrible games of all time, given new life. But is it really as bad as everyone remembers?

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It’s always fun to hear about what new retro sweetmeat has found its way to Good Old Games‘ DRM-free servers – to sigh and think of times gone by, to think of how silly our hair was in 1995 and to wonder whether the Manic Street Preachers would be any good today if Richie hadn’t gone missing.

Today, it’s the turn of Duke Nukem 3D, along with a host of other old Apogee stuff. It’s almost odd to think of people paying hard cash for Duke 3D these days – so many FPSes of that era simply haven’t aged as well as their less graphics-reliant strategy, RPG and adventure contemporaries. Of course, Duke earned some 21st century stripes last year, with the well-received XBLA port, so it’s nice to see him back on his original home too.
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[With Good Old Games' launch meaning that Sacrifice is once again available to buy, I thought I'd republish this old piece on RPS. A version of it originally appeared in PC Gamer as part of their Long Play series, but it's lived at my blog for a couple of years too. This version has a few tweaks to make more time-appropriate.]

Sacrifice makes me sad.

It’s not that it didn’t get a sequel. It’s not that it didn’t sell at all. It’s not that despite its critical appeal, it’s barely referenced today despite having innovated a number of mechanics and technologies. It’s not that now, years later, Shiny are a laughing stock among gamers’ for the various Matrix misadventures when once they were this good. Hell – it’s not even that due to gamers’ goldfish memories that Shiny’s entire history has been tarnished, with them being Stalinistically revised to always being hopeless.

Sacrifice makes me sad for even bigger reasons.
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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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We briefly mentioned Good Old Games yesterday, but if you’ve not heard of it then… well, suffice to say, if you’re the kind of fellow who reads this site regularly, then GoG’s mooted catalogue of classic game downloads is going to make you a very excited wee PCophile.

The retrocentric digi-store, offering DRM-free, cheapie downloads of the likes of Fallout, Sacrifice and Operation Flashpoint, isn’t starting up until September, but we thought we’d better chuck a few questions about the site’s origins and intentions at the folks behind it – CD Projekt, who you’re probably most familiar with for last year’s divisive RPG The Witcher. Now, they’re potential saviours of olden games…
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