f13.net

Edit: Liars.

http://www.gog.com/

http://twitter.com/gogcom

That seems rather sudden, since they just tossed up those Age of Wonder deals earlier this week.  Glad I didn't try to buy 'em after all.

Rumor is that GOG is being spun off from it's parent company.  It's possible that they're getting purchased by a publisher, or that they'll drop the GOG label, or they'll switch to a steam style delivery system.

That sucks, great service.

From what I've been hearing, the likely candidate is Atari's European publishing arm.

If that is what it is, then it's virtually guaranteed to be coming back with DRM and/or significantly higher prices.

No warning? Great thanks forgot to download one purchase before it shuttered.

Dammit, I was about to buy Outcast off them  :cry:

{edit}

wiki (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Old_Games)

That really really sucks.

Damn, I had a backlog of old games I wanted for them. I hope I didn't delete the install files for the ones that I already have.

I was inches away from picking up the MOO1&2 and MOM packs on Saturday.  Glad I didn't pull the trigger...

Why are you glad?

Once downloaded, all those games would have worked without GoG actually existing anymore.

It's a bad PR stunt. They moved from the beta age.

Might not be getting Interstate '76 from them after all then.

Because I hate making back ups, and who knows whether or not I'd be able to dl those games again.  At least with Steam I know my old copy of Freedom Force is just a click away.  I'm reasonably sure that Steam isn't going poof overnight.

God fucking damn it.

I have games I didn't have a chance to back up, and my computer's been down with a dead hard drive for the past two weeks.

I bought almost two dozen games from those guys. I loved that service.

Hate making backups?  MoM is what?  21 megs?  I can understand not wanting to put effort into a massive backup routine but the games in question are tiny.  Get a flash drive, drag and drop.  

Stormwaltz, the official word is all purchased materials will be available for download again on Thursday.  My guess is our accounts will be migrated to the new service or allowed access to the archive under closed accounts. 

I don't want to make back ups of anything if I can help it.  As long as its in the cloud with a reliable company I'm happy.

My GoG backup folder was ~5GB. They had a lot of big CD media based games, i76, Descent, Freespace2.

Buy the game, upload it to the cloud on a backup service.  :awesome_for_real:

Yay it was all a PR stunt :/

Supid stunt, especially the robes in the life feed. But Baldurs Gate without the disc hassle almost makes up for it.

Pulling out my purchases onto a flash when its back up. Won't purchase from them in the future if steam is an alternative.

Marketing dictating how a customers purchased product is available without warning is not a good campaign. This is against one of their selling points.

Their list of improvements is funnier than their attempted joke.

Facebook like button? 10% faster? Beam me up Scotty, the future of old games is here!

Wow, it was supposed to be all a joke?

So, so funny! Funny like getting a call from your bank saying that they closed one of your savings accounts and then getting a call back the next day saying "Surprise! You'll treasure it even more now, right?"

I'll never use their product, ever.

So they left all their customers in the breeze thinking they had to perform a hard drive circus act to get their games backed up, and it was 'just a joke?'  Fuck you guys.  Seriously.  That's just a dick move.

I thought that new features list was a joke!  What a terrible way to come out of beta.  Why not just say the service will be down for a day or two while an update/migration takes place.  Do not be concerned, protecting your investment is our highest priority!  They could even joke around about it being 10% faster and I would not care!

They will probably survive this blunder.  I can forgive them and keep using it, provided of course I still have my account and game access.

Not me.  You fuck around with paying customers like that and you don't deserve to be in business.  I'll stick with Steam exclusively from now on.

Well, that was... stupid.  :oh_i_see:

It seems clear I was less concerned about the shutdown than some.  Since they said previous purchases would be available again Thursday it did not seem like such a huge issue.  A stupid move?  Oh yes.  The whole gaming industry does stupid shit all the time. 

Clearly I am more forgiving than the Emperor.

dick move (dik muv) See: 2010 GOG.com site relaunch

Huh?  From the very beginning they said they were going to have ways for you to download your stuff within the week.  The phrasing was stupid and it was a bad PR stunt, but the end-of-the-world "Must make backups oh no!" vibe was all from the reaction.

(http://www.3click.tv/mp4//The%20Simpsons/season9/metadata/55638.jpg)

The point is that if your business model is digital distribution then you'd better damn well make sure that you have trust of your customers.  Doing something this fucking stupid for publicity?!?  Not exactly giving me warm fuzzies.

Bad stunt. Will not buy.

It's not the point.  Say you had two or three hundred dollars worth of games on their site.  Not a terribly outlandish gaming budget.  Of course you don't actually have most of that shit installed, because you're a gamer and either high right now or just plain lazy.  So you hear this news, and like I'm sure many folks did, you think, "Wow sucks they went under, now I have to perform gymnastics with all the porn on my hard drive to make room for all the shit I need to re-download, there goes my Sunday."

And then today rolls around.  And they're like, "Lol, JK."  But your porn is gone forever now, man.  Gone forever.  That shit is weak.

Telling people you're going to yank a service (and then not yanking it) is almost as bad as actually yanking it, because they have to go through whatever effort and stress they would have had to go through if it had been an actual emergency.

When Netflix announced they were going to scrap the multiple queue system, I spent a lot of time laboriously migrating stuff from my queue to my wife's queue.  When they announced that they weren't going to scrap queues after all, I was relieved on the one hand, but pissed because I'd wasted all that time.

It is hilarious that they didn't bitch slap the first person to suggest it let alone implement this PR stunt.

You guys are nuts. They said all along it would be back. They said it in vague terms because English isn't the first language of most of the people. Then the Eastern European press turned it into GOG shutting down. Did they do a semi-noisy relaunch? Yes. They never said they were going away forever.

Yeah ok.  :oh_i_see:

Check their facebook. The day of the announcement there was an interview over in Europe they did saying they weren't shutting down. Five minutes of googling post news break cleared it up for me the day of. This is a fuck up, for sure, but it's one of clarity, not maliciousness.

They kept sending me Farmville updates, so I put them on ignore.  My bad.

I wasn't even subbed to their facebook. I can't even remember why I ended up going to facebook but I did. In between the despair a bunch of people were pointing to some interview they did the day of saying they were for sure going to be back. The site it was on was crashed through traffic half the day but when I got in, sure enough. Now I'm hearing that there was some second rumor report out of Poland that exacerbated the problem by saying that they were definitely shutting down for good. There was also rampant (and reasonable) speculation that they were going to have to add DRM in order to hang on to some of the licenses. But at no point, after the initial panic and investigation, did it swing back into definitely shutting down territory.

None of that changes what they initially said, which is right up there in Trippy's quote.

Which is at odds with my saying it's a fuck up but not a malicious fuck up how?

Just kidding:

http://www.gog.com/

What a bunch of fags, I don't think I would ever touch their site ever again.

This word "presents"; it does not mean what you think it means. 

Obviously this was a hilarious joke in the original Czech.

If I lost my lesbian scissoring porn because of something like this...I would be very pissed. :ye_gods:

Because lying to the point of causing your customers extra hassle is malicious whether it's intended as a joke or not.  I'm pretty sure when you buy games from them there's no disclaimer that says:  We reserve the right to trick you into thinking our company is disintegrating only to reveal it's all just a big joke.

The first thing I thought of when I read this was not only does their shut-down hurt them, but it also hurts Valve/Steam.  Online companies have worked their asses off to get customers to the point where they have confidence to buy shit online.  Had this been real, it might have caused a lot of people to start thinking twice about digital distribution.  And I bet there's a lot of people who will still think twice even though it's a joke.  It caused me to immediately think of all the crap I have on Steam, and what I'd do if they went poof.  This was a monumentally stupid thing to do.

Somebody get Gabe Newell on the Subway diet, and let's start grooming clones of his fat ass to rule the gaming world for perpetuity.

Yes, it was beyond retarded and extremely childish. For those robes alone they deserve a beating.

Doesn't change the fact that I have their games on my HDD and that HDD has a backup on an external partition. If I see it as games I bought in digital format I'm ok with the download working only when I buy it. If I wanted anything beyond that for the price I pay for those games, I couldn't use their service in good conscience anymore.

Dude. Really pro gamers have a whole external HD for their porn.

(Back in serious mode land:)
Jesus christ, that was stupid. "We have played a little game. Played a little game with our users.". I can see how they could think this would be funny, but I think that the people they're targeting (grumpy old gamers who want the good old games of their youths) aren't exactly going to stunts like this all that funny. Not after we've seen stupid ideas like "stay online or don't play your games" actually be taken seriously and implemented. I hope that whoever thought of this takes a (mental) beating and stops thinking of stunts like this.

Having said that, I doubt it's going to kill them. I agree with Tebonas about the price of those games being so ridiculously low that I personally assumed that I have to keep them safe after downloading, and the news of a DRM-free baldur's gate has me salivating. I think we're looking at what's possibly their critical point.

As long as they stop thinking up asshat ideas like this stunt. And the munk theme? :ye_gods:

Out of curiosity, does the BG series work on Vista? I mean without DOXBox and whatnots. I've read conflicting reports.

They have a facebook? Well, that clears up any confusion then, since everyone checks facebook. :oh_i_see:

Their site still doesn't work me. It's a sign.

It's working now, though slowly.

Seems like access to TOCA:3 is broken for me (note: the game was on sale before being pulled from GOG inventory. Downloads use to work after it was taken out of inventory but now its totally broken). Alas the site is kinda working and when you can download via browser it maxes out my connection. Looks like they are just dealing with a big connection load.

Assholes.

(http://dl.dropbox.com/u/85916/ronjeremy_loljk.bmp)

It ran fine on my Vista laptop.

As in Baldur's Gate?

Infinity Engine can behave unpredictably, but most of the Black Isle games will run on Windows 7.  BG1 / TotSC really should be played in the BG2 engine for better looking shit, done via the shit on the Baldur's Gate Collection DVD or by using Tutu (http://www.pocketplane.net/mambo/index.php?option=content&task=blogcategory&id=143&Itemid=98).

Well I have all my original discs from oh god was it really that long ago? I was considering firing them back up before GOG broke that they had the license for the first. I just never got around to it.

Fixed

Don't have facebook, or twitter or any of that shit so why should I have to have it to check if a company's official website is all "lol cool joke bro"

So, uh.

(http://www.gog.com/upload/images/2010/09/3272426bd0410b1ac81d002549bbecdbe995e027_small.jpg)

Gog.com, now better than Steam.

SQUEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

(It was still a stupid move. But SQUEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE)

For things like that they can pull one or two more stupid pranks before I get mad at them.

Just to reiterate: SQUEEEEEE. I've got to get me one of those. :grin:

GOG points out how weak we all are.



Dammit.

Well it's nice to see the oldest profession is alive and well.

How did you all lose your Torment disks?  Those should be in a safe deposit box.

Who said I lost them? Does the old version work on W7? I also like having just the one installer, burn that onto a single dvd.

I still have my diskettes from the early 90s and a 486 to play them on. Convenience is nice, though. Still have the Torment box, even. Though my dedicated gaming room didn't come together, as my house is too small for discreet room functions like that...so the box collection might have to go. I think I've got the box for every game I've ever bought, excepting digitally of course.

Fantastic.  I was playing this on Gametap before they pissed me off, but fuck Gametap.  Now I get to start over AGAIN.

(http://dl.dropbox.com/u/85916/planescape_gog.png)

I am a fucking sucker for this sort of shit.  I can't keep hating GoG.

Holy shit, soundtrack?

That's GoG's standard operating procedure.  They pack in everything they possibly can, art, manuals, soundtracks, etc.  Honestly, despite their bout of stupidity last week, they're still one of the best online vendors for games, and I say this despite my overly large Steam collection.  

I want to set up a picture of the nameless one from the cover, without the game title, with the caption "Please have a seat".

(http://dl.dropbox.com/u/85916/gabriel-nameless.png)

mr hansen?

How come we haven't gotten an updated version of this?  Some weird trademark thing?

Double Edit: http://www.gog.com/en/forum/planescape_torment/mod_guide/page1

Don't be too certain you need the resolution and ui hacks. A friend of mine was telling me that the GOG version of Age of Wonders had revamped widescreen support to the extreme max.

I just pirated Planescape, since at the time there was nobody selling it except those fuckers on eBay charging a kidney per disc.

The original version does work on Win7 64 with some very minor tweaking.

Yes, but you we would be total assholes to not buy it after whining for so long that we want it. Who wants to be THAT douchebag?

Shadow Magic at least has always supported widescreen.

Even after 10 years of hearing how great the game is, I still find the setting of Planescape too off-putting to buy it.

It makes me a bit sad.

That is unfortunate.  Planescape is my favorite D&D setting, and one of my favorite RPG settings.  It lets you play D&D, but it's okay to vary things up, and you get away from Elf, Orc, Hobbit, Dwarf.  I suppose I always liked the Fantastic in my Fantasy though.  Tolkien-spawn is boring.

It was easily TSRs most "roleplaying" setting, with it's very heavy emphasis on beliefs and philosophy rather than action. They even have one rule book for the settings (Faces of Evil: The Fiends), which didn't contain a single stat or new rule - it was purely about how the fiendish races lived and functioned as a society. It was to give the DM a better guide about how to play them as enemies, and ideas for including them in your campaign.

Compared to the average TSR supplement at the time which were purely cash grabs, with spells, items and new rules included out the wazoo, it was a really refreshing change. I've still got every Planescape supplement sealed away in a box under my bed, and read them every 3 or 4 years or so.

Mmm...diterlizzi

I have the opposite sadness;  I still have my original disks but I have played the game to death.  I can't understand this fucking thread at all, since I assume that everyone has done the same.

Yeah, I still have my disks, and while Torment is easily in my top 5 RPGs ever, I don't feel like it rewards constant replays the way some other great ones do. Exhausting the possibilities there took way fewer replays than, say, BG2.

Yeah, it's up there, but Fallout 2 has much much more replay. 

I would absolutely love seeing some more planescape games made.  I always did homebrew, but I bought anything planescape cause it was just that awesome to read about.  It was my first "portals to everywhere" type experience, and reading about a horribly dark and dangerous place, where everything from all corners of reality somehow managed to co-exist (under duress), just intrigued me to no end.  The endless possibilities, I think, was the most attractive.

You're a writer right?

Man up and don't be a bitch. It still sets the bar for writing in games.

I've never played Planescape, but I'm guessing now's the time?

After reading xilren's (?) writeup thread in the radicalthon subforum, I've been tempted to give this game a go. I guess as long as GOG stays up, I now have the opportunity.

Never played Planescape either. Just bought it with hopes it will work with the netbook I'll be taking on a flight this weekend.

The silver lining for me, and hopefully others, from the shuttingdownjklol stunt was the prompting of this thread ultimately resulting in me checking out this heavenly no-DRM / no-client site which I had previously known about but never visited.

Setting up an account and completing the transaction all from my phone (even download!) was very easy.

No, sir.  I did not play it on release and on two previous attempts I have gotten as far as leaving the Mortuary.  I feel good about this time, though, since it doesn't hinge upon a service subscription or buying software behind a gas station.

I lost my Planescape disks when I moved a long time ago ... so sold.

While Planescape was fun I cannot imagine installing and playing it again (still have my discs)

One of my many secret gaming shames is that I have a copy of Torment that I bought on eBay some years ago but have never gotten around to installing.  I can see it on my shelf now, scowling at me disapprovingly.

Followed all the steps to the main guide, worked great.  Set to 1920x1080 and I really appreciate the bigger font:


Anyone know if "identify all items" and "rest anywhere" tweaks are good to have or does it cheapen gameplay?

Good luck to you.  I am sceptical, but Good Luck.

Torment is an old Bioware RPG.  You need to be on the lookout for sado-masochistic gameplay mechanics to mod out.

So I'll be adding those tweaks then.  :grin: Thanks.

Note: Save before conversing with party members.  Particularly Annah of the Shadows, Ignus the Pyromancer, and Vhailor the Mercykiller.  The game even warns you that the latter two are really, really fucking dangerous.  Also, every character in your party has a reason that they follow you, and lots of the plot-central NPC's you meet have a past history with you.  Try and discover how it all went/goes down, because it's quite possibly the most disturbing story you will ever find in a video game.

The late game is full of enemies that will rip your shit apart.  Difficulty slider or cheat your way past if need be, you're playing this game for the story.  There is only one ending, and oddly enough it makes sense for any type of character you might play.  So enjoy the ride without repercussions if you so desire, or torment yourself trying to be a good guy if you really feel like it.

Your optimism is a beacon to me.

Black Isle, not BW.

Same people, new name.

No Black Isle Studios and BioWare were separate companies. BI was Interplay's RPG studio.

Okay, so what was the deal with them and Bioware concerning the development of all the Infinity Engine games?

They shared a publisher, and the IE was licensed to BI by BioWare if I'm remembering right.

Black Isle was mostly the same big names that are Obsidian now (Chris Avellone, Feargus Urqhart, etc.)

Hah this sounds awesome. Starting on the plane soon.

Wait, what?  I could have sworn that there was at least 2, possibly 3 endings to the game, but it has been a LONG time since i played it.

Also, I have to say that personally, my favoiurite bit is the scene where he is recalling a past "life" where he was a philosiphical speaker, and he manages to debate some guy into believing himself out of existance.  Gotta love Planescape.

There are different ways to resolve the final section of the game, but you could argue back and forth about whether they constituted different endings or not. The results for your companions vary, certainly, but ultimately the central story isn't changed.

End, as in where we leave off.

What can change the nature of a man?

It's funny; I've played this game 3 times, at 3 different stages in my life, and the answer has been the same each time.



Probably my favorite game of all time. You're missing out if you don't play this game. It's completely playable with the resolution/font hack. Be a mage if you want ez-mode. Spec for the maximum dialog options. This is not a beatemup.

My experience is identical and I'm going to give it another go as well.

I have turned on the "rest anywhere" tweak since I'm most interesting in story and not tedious gameplay. I know it was touched on a few posts earlier but will this make it so easy that it will ruin my experience?

No, you want this mod.  The planes will touch you in even worse places otherwise.

I'm only a few rooms out from the place where I woke up and I'm hooked.  Quite a compelling intro setting up someone so tormented he can't truly die.  The requisite RPG amnesia makes sense in this context and I really want to find out his secret.  It's gotta be something big.  Even more embarrased I never played it before.

Boosting cha / wis / int for dialogue and those stats tie into Mage.  Only small problem is the crash upon quitting in Windows 7 but it just means an extra button press to exit.

Also got a 50% off sale email from GOG: http://www.gog.com/en/promo/community_favourites (http://www.gog.com/en/promo/community_favourites) Myst will be bought, likely a few others.  Flipping through those games makes me want to YouTube Syndicate for some nostalgic reason.

Ach, fuck you all.  Don't make me reinstall this again.  I KNOW EVERY INCH OF IT.  It'll be like fucking the wife.

And this is a bad thing ... how?

You don't have kids, huh?

Uggg must resist 50% off (http://www.gog.com/en/promo/community_favourites) a bunch of titles: 

ARCANUM: OF STEAMWORKS AND MAGICK OBSCURA
DUKE NUKEM 3D: ATOMIC EDITION
INCREDIBLE MACHINE MEGA PACK, THE
INTERSTATE ’76 ARSENAL, THE
JAGGED ALLIANCE 2
LONGEST JOURNEY, THE
MYST: MASTERPIECE EDITION
PSYCHONAUTS
SYBERIA
TEX MURPHY: UNDER A KILLING MOON

I76/Arcanum for $2.99 each!

 :grin:

This is going to be a wild ride.

"Darling, I just compared fucking you to Torment."

Random question, do people in Europe have any issues using GOG?

Had never tried GOG before, planned on never trying it after reading about this "PR stunt" mess.  Then I see they have Arcanum for $2.99...and I think I lost my discs ages ago....damnit.

Also I take it from this thread I should probably try Planetscape : Torment at some point.  :oh_i_see:

Actually I think there are four endings...with one of them being AWESOME!

Well, there's one ending where you die straight out before the end and cant complete the game, which is possible but heavily flagged by the game with DON'T DO THIS signs. But you can get to the other ending in various ways by dealing with the end bad guy in different ways.

Don't know.  When there is a decent game that I want that I don't have the disks lying around for, I'll let you know.

You always get the same finale cinematic, wherein Chris Avellone announces his intent to not make a sequel.

You might check youtube.

Or I could launch NearInfinity and open the game archives to watch the movies.

Not at all, using it since early beta without problems. Since its a European company thats not really surprising, though.

Thanks, my only worry was seeing everything in $, I guess that only means we get hit with heinous fx charges?

For Planescape Torment I paid 7,50 Euro for 9,99 USD.

Sweet. Time to go burn more money.

Holy Crap, they have Independence War (http://www.gog.com/en/gamecard/independence_war_deluxe)! This is one of the best space combat games ever made.  Ka ching! :drill:

http://www.gog.com/en/gamecard/the_temple_of_elemental_evil

Temple of Elemental Evil for $5.99.

Looks patched too.

I never got around to playing it because it was so Trokia'd when it was released.

Fuck me running.

From what the forums are saying, it looks like it doesn't have the atari patch 3, which means it's compatiable with the Circle of Eight patch that fixes the vast pile of bugs that this game was.  You can find info and links to the mod here:

http://www.gog.com/en/forum/temple_of_elemental_evil/circle_of_eight_modpack/page1

Keep in mind you can't patch the writing.  :oh_i_see:

Wait, there's dialog?  Does this happen at some point after the many consecutive rooms of hobgoblins, bugbears, and everything else out of the monster manual?

I'd need to buy a new joystick for it.  I sold mine a few years ago.   But man I loved I-War.  Hell, I loved the entire space sim genre before it went and just died.    :sad_panda:

Goddamn it. Now I have to buy ToEE. I have the load CD sitting on my desk- I tried to find the other disk(s?) a few months back, but no dice.

They are on a roll right now.

I guess they knew they can do whatever they like with us in regard of dumb marketing stunts because their new additions to the lineup are like catnip for classic crpg gamers.

Hah, I'm in the same boat.  An old roommate of mine has my play disk, but misplaced it, I only have my load one.  I was actually looking online, thinking about replacing it a few weeks ago, but was coming up empty with the game being around $50 everywhere, so this makes me happy.

Don't.  I did this myself about a month back.  It's not really worth it.  The flaws in the system bring it right down to fucking annoying.

Even with the CoE patch? ToEE is probably my favorite module of all time, so I really want to get into the Temple itself at some point (never made it in on my first playthrough due to crippling bugs, IIRC)? I will spend more than $6 on lunch today; the price is too low to ignore!