Good Old Games is a new game download system that will focus on delivering the games from yesteryear to your hard drive, all for between five and ten bucks.
I suppose it’s not a bad idea, but we already have Gametap, right? Competition is good, of course, but a lot will depend on the ease of use and size of the library.
There will be no DRM, either, if you care about that sort of thing.
Vista support, baby, Vista support.
Some of us are holding onto XP with our cold dead hands, but, yeah, that’s a big positive. If they can make it work. In my experience, a lot of Vista support is partial at best.
They have some good people behind this, though, so I have hope.
The other thing to note about GameTap is that useful additions like fan-produced patches and custom scenarios can’t be used in those game versions since the entire directory structure (not just the game exe) is walled off behind the DRM.
It’s not a big deal when playing a game that never got a huge fan backing, but it’s a real downer for games like Age of Wonders 2 or Jagged Alliance 2 that have extensive fan patches, or games like the Panzer General 2 and 3 that have large, still-active fan scenario communities.
O, yes it is. I’m a big fan of GameTap but I’d much rather have something that I can keep. It’s much less likely to go away (I’m looking at you soon to return Freespace 2) or get more expensive. It’ll also be nice to back up my saved games and use mods, the latter of which is a big issue with GameTap.
Cautiously optimistic.
The thing that makes me wonder is the fact that they’re going to make all these old games Vista and XP compatible straight from the get-go, which means they’re having to do some sort of wrapper around the base game, or something. So how will that affect things? Could you mod the game then? Is it going to install spyware? I mean, it *is* coming from Eastern Europe…which reminds me, do I really want to give my credit card number to someone in Eastern Europe?
Eh, there are really only a handful of old games that would make this worth it. But yeah, Vista support is very nice.
The guaranteed compatibility is the really the biggest selling point, although I wonder if they’re solving that problem by pre-wrapping things in DOSBox or something?
The DRM-free claim makes a lot of sense, since I imagine they’re “competing” with the abandonware crowd. (Technically, I guess it wouldn’t really be abandonware anymore if it’s on GOG.)
When it comes to Europe, the Gametap argument is null and void. Gametap doesn’t serve the old continent, that’s why GOG is amazing news.