f13.net

I'm thinking of setting up with gog.com as an affiliate when it launches. Just wondering if that's cool with everyone and if you'd be willing to purchase games that way. Given the community and how many games people here would buy if it works in every OS for $5-$10 a pop, I think maybe it could kill the need for a donation drive and maybe even buy me a grocery run. I don't want to throw up ads or anything, probably just something in the news box but I also know I never wanted any sort of advertisement on f13 again a while ago. But yea, feedback plz.

Do they offer free 2day shipping like amazon?  ;D (That's a joke, I see it's a download thingy).

edit: I don't buy too many games, but I certainly wouldn't mind. Of course, depends on the integration.

Wat?

Dude, it's digital download, copyright free, modified games to work in vista and xp (both 32 and 64 for both). All classics.

Newsletter.  Yours.

I'll gladly give you part of what I burn away on games.

Anyone have any experience with gog? I like the idea of the site in principle, but I wonder how well it works in practice, and what sort of catalogue they have. Although Fallout2 features prominently on their beta homepage, I have to wonder how far back they can go and still make it Vista compatible. Fallout 1? DarkForces? 11th Hour?

We don't know any of this yet. Gog.com has it's own thread anyway. At this point, I'm just banking on it not sucking.

If they were truly copyright-free there would be no need to buy them.

DRM free?

I would love a way to support Stardock-like publishers.

I meant DRM free.

Well then given the people here only one person is going to need to buy it :awesome_for_real:

I'll totally do it. Provided their service and selection don't blow of course.

I'd give it a look, sure.

I see no downside.  Go for it.

What are you implying about the people here Trippy? Personally I stopped pirating games when I had the disposable income to buy them. Just so that I get more good games. Planescape Torment should have taught us something. So are retarded people here that hate games?  :ye_gods:

I can't see anything on the site that says whether or not it'll be available internationally or US only. If it's international then sure.

Is there a list of available titles? I would definitely do this, especially if I could get MoM.

You're not going to be able to get MoM because Atari is a bunch of pricks.  Put on an eyepatch and get DOSbox.

Why are the people afraid to say why?

Edit: I wouldn't have put it to a vote if I didn't want opinions :(

There was no "No, I don't buy games online because I'm a luddite" option.   I dislike having to have an auth-app like Steam or EA's patcher to run my games.  Yes, I'm playing very little on the PC outside of MMOs these days because of it and I'm fine with that.

You won't find a more physical-media friendly luddite than me. But for the price and especially if they put in some time to make it work with modern OSes, fuggit. Sounds good. Of course, it seems like I already own most of the stuff I'd want, and old pcs to play it on :)

By DRM-free, you mean I can burn it to a DVD and install it in ten years after this gog.com site has gone out of business?

That's their plan.

Sounds great. Wonder where the catch is, businesses never do good things. When do the corporate lawyers get involved to shut it down?

Also, howsabout SMAX, ffs. Sid is such a cocksucker.

I don't buy this for a second.  We'll see, I suppose, but I got burned on $20 worth of music since Music Match files are no longer supported (and hey I can't burn them because their authent. servers went offline before I'd found that out.)  Yeah, it's only $20 but it was an lesson in why DRM sucks and why I'm not buying anything that uses it ever again.

GOG.com has zero DRM. Supposedly.

I read this as "if we affiliate with someone will you buy games through them". So I said no. Because my response is "buy games from some place just because they have an affiliation with here? Uh. No. What if it's shit, or over priced. Or bad service."

When it comes down to the details of Gog.com then it's not the same question in my head. It's more like "if you were to buy games from Gog.com, would you buy them through f.13 affiliation to help the site?" Which is a different question for me.

To which I would say yes. If I wanted anything from there for some reason I would use an affiliation if it was setup. But I'm not going to pick Gog.com over another better service because of it (if one exists), and I'm not going to buy stuff I wouldn't want to buy already.

Hope that explains why I chose the third option there for you schild.

Yes, it does.

And yes, I'm hoping gog.com doesn't turn out to be crap. Hope beyond hope.

My understanding of "affiliate" was that you could go through F13 to buy GOG games.  My wife buys a lot of shit from Amazon and my web site yegolev.com is an Amazon affliliate, meaning that when she goes to yegolev.com and clicks on the Amazon button on her way to place an order for the next batch of yaoi manga, I get a slice of that.  Since we are going to be sending cash to Amazon anyway, there is absolutely no downside for us.  In theory*, I'll be buying shit from GOG, so having a web-layover at F13 isn't a problem.  Hell, I'm here all the time anyway.

* The theory holds that GOG will offer games I want for a sane price, plus I will be able to burn them to optical disc for later use.  I'll be fine with the first bit.  The second bit sounds too good to be true.

Assuming this:


Then sure. If they have shit I want anyway. And if they deal with unAmericans.

If they get decent games, I will buy tons.

Seems a good fit for your board's population, so I say go for it. Plus, you're just providing a link, correct? I fail to see how this plan would hurt at all and it's not exactly selling out. Selling out is Click here to skip this ad and continue to f13 "Awesome Pictures Thread."   :why_so_serious:

Works for me. I've gladly supported D2D. If the system is reliable, why not.

Seems like a good fit for the folks that bum around here.If anything caught my eye I'd grab it through here.Probably after reading a few reports from those of you that grab things first in case there's some hidden annoying factor involved tho.

I'll be buying from GOG regardless. Why not help F13 at the same time?

GOG is having an open beta now. If you sign up before the 8th, you're in. Just head to their site and you'll see the sign up.

Is Ultima Underworld on the list of games?


Edit: Wrong game.

The open beta will probably have a handful of games for sale. If you could be patient and wait for me to get the affiliate shit up before buying a bunch of shit, that would be awesome. I know patience is the worst thing to ask of a gamer. But that's just how it goes :P

Oh, its not that, ill buy through you and f13 (if at all). Just wanted to know about the catalog of games really.

That was actually towards other folks. We don't know all the games in the catalog yet. I'll be sure to have a comprehensive list as soon as it's available though.

cool, my bad.

Classic PC Games For Cheap!
The makers of The Witcher prepare to launch PC game download store.

By Jeff Green

It's a little-known secret shared by old people everywhere that things used to be better back in the good old days. You know, before everything started sucking. Thankfully, the folks at CD Projekt -- the Polish game studio behind last year's excellent PC action role-playing game The Witcher -- understand this. Which is why, in addition to making their own new games, they're also about to launch a new website, Good Old Games (GOG.com), where curmudgeonly old folks and curious youngsters can download -- dirt cheap and DRM free -- classic PC games from the days of yore, all completely rejiggered to run under Windows XP and Vista.

Blessed with a fancy-pants beta press account, handed out to ensure enthusiastic coverage -- like what you're seeing here -- I recently made my way over to GOG.com and, for a mere $5.99, downloaded Fallout 1 (complete with PDF manual, screensavers, and the soundtrack). A mere 10 minutes later, I was playing this classic PC RPG in full screen on my 23-inch widescreen monitor, with nary a problem or incompatibility in sight. And once I purchased the game, I could now redownload it to any PC, for free, as many times as I wanted. Kool-Aid now fully consumed, I sent a few questions off to Adam Oldakowski, the managing director of GOG.com, to fill me in on some of the details of the operation.


UP: Don't you guys worry that the no-DRM feature is gonna make it too easy to get these games freely passed around now? I mean, it's one of the biggest appeals of GOG.com for sure, but it's also easily abusable.

AO: The no-DRM feature is something we're really proud of. We know for certain that copy-protection schemes are something gamers really hate, and it's about time they stopped being treated like criminals. In the end, all games get pirated anyway. No matter what type of protection you use, someone will hack it. But we believe that our features like DRM-free games, low price points, and cool additional materials will work like some sort of loyalty program. Hopefully, this will make people buy more games at GOG.com, and thanks to that, we'll be able to offer more games from different publishers.

1UP: The installer worked beautifully for me for Fallout 1. What have you guys done to make this happen? How were you able to go in and rejigger the code to get it to work so easily on XP/Vista? Was it just a matter of creating a new install program, and that's it? Or did you have to go in and futz with game code, too?

AO: We don't have the source code for games, so we can't do the optimization that way. It takes a little magic from our programming team to make it work. The biggest issue with the old games is the installation process -- every old game is optimized to install and run on the operating system from back then. Modern operating systems use different libraries and engines that sometimes collide with old games files, so our programmers search for such incompatibilities and bypass them with their great talent -- and little programming tricks that us ordinary people wouldn't understand.

1UP: Where are you guys getting some of the extra stuff -- like the wallpapers, avatars, and so on -- that come with when you purchase a game? Are those going to be available for every game?

AO: The additional stuff takes a fair bit of extra effort from us, especially for the materials from the games published before the Internet era. We get some of the stuff from publishers, and the rest -- about 90 percent -- comes into play thanks to the hard work of our designers. Sometimes, it's almost impossible to do something cool with the resources we find on the Internet, but we do our best to add some cool additional materials to every game.

1UP: Are you going to require a membership fee or anything like that? Or is this just a pay-by-the-game service? Is the sign-up free?

AO: We want to keep the service as simple as possible, so there are no fees for creating an account at GOG.com. All you pay for are games. Even better, some of the community features don't require users to have an account at all. But to fully experience GOG.com, we recommend signing up. With a GOG.com account, users will be able to buy and download games, write game reviews, rate games and other users' contributions, get support for the games they own, and download tons of cool and exclusive content for every game they buy.

GOG's launch titles

Here's a partial list of the games to be available for download at GOG.com's launch later this month.

From Interplay
Descent 1-3
Fallout 1 and 2
FreeSpace 2
Giants: Citizen Kabuto
Jagged Alliance 2

From Interplay
Kingpin: Life of Crime
Lionheart: Legacy of the Crusader
MDK2
Redneck Rampage
Sacrifice

From Codemasters:
Colin McRae Rally 2005
Operation Flashpoint
TOCA Race Driver 3

Lionheart but no Planescape :(:(*:(:(:(:(

LMAO Redneck Rampage was the first FPS I ever played online. Good times.

Here's what's available in the beta. I have no clue what's going to happen with the affiliate program.

Oh, all of those seem to be $6 except 1nsane is $10.

Holy fuck, there's easily half-a-dozen games there I'll purchase immediately. MAX/MAX2, Conquest of the New World, F1/F2...

That's a lot of value for $6.

Yea. I'm hoping they launch everything immediately :(

Shogo!

That is certainly an awesome batch of games.

I can't wait for people to complain about motion sickness again.

I might try Shogo after all this time, but... Blood 2.

I never played Giants or Messiah, so those might be interesting.

Some excellent choices right out the gate. Now I just need to find time to play them on top of everything else. 

Fallout Tactics was the shiznit multiplayer and Shogo kicked ass. I wonder if they'd support multiplayer mods like Mechs vs. Squishies.

They emailed me about using some guides I wrote. I really should get back to them.

Please do. Have them make all checks payable to Eric Schild at f13.net. Thx.

The gender question made me lol.

I thought this was suppose to have Planescape?

That's because You Can't Read Well. Being married made you weak, stupid, and illiterate.

I am in but I have not bought anything yet.  I already own most of the good ones.  Is Sacrifice any good?

It was quirky. I loved it and played a lot of LAN games. The spells and creatures were amazing for the time, lots of character. Volcano and Tornado still stand out as a couple of the best implementation of video game spellcasting evar imo.

But...manawhores. That mechanic blew. I put up with it because the rest was so much fun.

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btw the buy one get one free is great... fallout 1/2 for $5.99 legally and not dicking around with custom setups.. cannot complain there!

Get the affiliate program going, if they get lucasarts on board so I could buy SWOTL again with all add ons I'd be a happy camper.

Yes, if repetitive on the 3rd time through. However, each god gets such a unique set of powers you really want to see them all... (or I did, but only managed to make it through about 5 out of 7 play-throughs).

Hrm, I wonder if these old games + those shitty netbooks = Portal gaming!

I took advantage and got Falllout 1+2 for 6$ (had to take advantage of the get one for free deal), downloading and installation worked flawlessly. Better than the hassle with my original CDs. I like it, as soon as you get that affiliate program working, I'll shop around there for more.

I can't remember if I ever played Jagged Alliance 2. I played the shit out of the first one.

JA2 is a masterpiece.  I would kill for a graphical update of it. 

Silent Storm came close but... yah, robots (actually power armor/mecha but same difference, it completely changed the game).

I expect this will depend on what they have to do to make it run.  If an emulator is required, it can hammer a modern system.  For example, I had unsatisfactory results trying to play System Shock (CD version) on DOSBox/XP due to framerate.

I have JA2 on CDROM, so... try again GoG.  :awesome_for_real:

I got into this but haven't bought anything yet either. That Fallout 1/2 or Tactics deal looks like a very good one. They really need to get System Shock 1 & 2 working with this, maybe even some of the good Ultimas.

I swear schild said they'd have Planescape Torment.

You're wrong, Hat.

If having Planescape Torment on there is wrong,

I don't ever want to be right.

I could've sworn they were going to accept PayPal.

Boo. No games for me.

Yea, lack of paypal is mindnumbing.

I was going to buy fallout until I realized no Paypal. I'm surprised how many places haven't added it as an option.

This affiliate program is awesome.

I'm in.

They added Paypal today. These guys are good.

So if I was going to go for the Interplay deal and get 1 free game, which should I choose? I.e. I know I want to get Fallout: Tactics. So if my other game is a choice between Fallout 1 or 2, will I miss anything by getting 2 instead of 1?

Some of the backstory and references between the two games. I would get 1 now with the deal and 2 later if you like it. They are not that different, and if you really want to play both the right order makes more sense.

I, for one, intend to repay their kindness by buying half their stock. Oh ho ho, never give me news like this on payday!

EDIT: So the affiliate program, HOW DOES I USES IT? Or is it even set up yet?

Unrelated: One of our localization team was showing CDProjekt's deluxe Polish version of Mass Effect PC yesterday. It was jaw-droppingly awesome and filled me with lust. Way, WAY better than what you can get in NA. When these guys do something, they do it fucking right. Everything I've seen from them has increased my respect.

I hope they stay afloat. Sadly, the business model they're working by isn't one that's often seen as successful.

The MOMENT the affiliate program gets put in place, I will make a post here. Sorry for the delay that I have nothing to do with. They need to get their shit together on that.

Did they fix the inventory GUI?

They do translation, packaging, and distribution, not content or code.

You were gushing about what, then?  The box?  Details, man.

Its not that the bar is very high on that one. The german special edition was especially crappy.

The box is about a 18" square and 3-4" thick. Sturdy, high quality cardboard with art on all sides. In addition to the game, it comes with an N7 t-shirt, soundtrack CD, full-color gloss-finish art book (including a lot of obscure concept stuff that even our artists didn't remember), a bigger manual, and a set of concept art postcards from the worlds in the game, all lovingly cradled in padding.

There may have been other stuff that I missed - like I said, it was being shown around, I didn't get a chance to poke through it myself.

I kind of want that.

If the Witcher Special Edition was any indication of what they pack together, I'm sure it was all kinds of awesome. Putting the Witcher Wolf Medallion in it? Genius.

I was reminded today that the ME box also included a lanyard (meh) and a mousepad (win!).

I already have a mousepad with a big  :awesome_for_real: on it.

Mousepads are so 90s.

Will GOG support/work with fan made patches and mods?

whats the quality like?  Are these games on some crappy lil emulator to be played in a 640x480 window or will they support higher rez and widescreen gameplay?  I used to just adjust my OS screenrez for a larger more visable size but with LCD/widescreen this just makes stuff look like ass, which more often than not leaves you playing in a tiny lil 5" window (commodore 64 portable flashbacks).

You think they kidnapped the original programmers and forced them to rewrite their games in high resolution?

I don't care if it is truly rendered at high resolution I just want it to scale (preferably in a window to avoid wide screen distortion), sort of like how there are some widescreen hacks floating around for older games.

Hows it going with the program? Castles and Castles 2 are coming. I loved the shit out of those games when they were released.

If they announced something I'd be all over it. If I missed it I'd be annoyed.