GOG 2019: Good Games Old and New

Looks like TIE Fighter isn’t in the first round of games (yeah, it’s actually gradual unfortunately). But hopefully soon.

I just finished replaying Ultima 7 and had an absolute blast, but a while back I couldn’t get into trying to replay Ultima Underworld. The control scheme is just too weird by today’s standards and the graphics are just too low res.

Ultima Underworld does have a weird control scheme by today’s standards, but it’s still great. If you want a modern control scheme for the first part, you can use the unity remake.

Additionally, I recommend people who want to play DOS games to look into improving the music with general midi soundfonts. The experience will be substantially better. The easiest way to do it is using VirtualMidiSynth.

Felt the need to throw some more support to GoG, so I expanded my library to 126 games by picking up Vampire Bloodlines, Gothic 2 Gold and Gothic 3, even though I had them all in various forms (including on Steam). I wish they had Gothic 2 original, as I wouldn’t mind someday playing through vanilla, then Gold, as I recall some of the changes made to the encounters and new NPCs etc. were interesting.

Gamersgate.co.uk is your friend. For Night of the Raven too.

Thanks to various sales, I now have 1-8 Ultima games from GOG. Having never played any before, I thought I’d wait until I had them all, then start from 1. However, I just installed 1, and am completely at a loss and it seems like a good deal of work will be required to understand how to play since the GOG-provided manual is useless. Anyone have suggestions on if I should just skip 1, and if so, what would be a good starting point for the series?

4-7 probably hold up the best to modern audiences. 3 was the only one I recall where you created your whole party. Never played 1 or 2 though. Origin had crazy good manuals and background stuff in their games. I’m surprised that GOG doesn’t have PDFs or whatever of those manuals. But I’d think you could find some online somewhere if you wanted. Also I know 5 has some mods to update the graphics a bit which make it easier to play. I think maybe 4 does too. 8 is kinda odd in that it sorta tried to be more actiony and failed. But it started out pretty dark too so that was kinda neat.

I’ll pick up Albion later tonight & report back.

Seconding what lostcawz said, but recommend trying those games last. In order from 4-7, some of the characters show up again. It’s hard to play 1-3 after enjoying them. 8 is its own thing and very different. Ultima 4 is one of the all-time classics so I hope you enjoy it as much as some of us did. Best played with the original map & manuals, no cheat sites :) I still have a binder with all my old notes for it.

Don’t buy 9. It …isn’t very good in 2019.

Ok, installing 4 now. Thanks very much!

Gigg in my experience Albion was a bit odd. I’d love to hear your report. I think I liked what they tried to do but…

FYI the key thing GOG got Dosbox to do was to develop a file system overlay layer a la docker, allowing all game file changes to be in its own layer that’s synchronized in the cloud. Pretty cool.

GOG had a revenue of about $ 34 million in 2018… with a $ 7.8k net profit.

Sure, it’s a small profit (and the end of their Fair Price package was too late in the year to make a huge difference), but GOG had decent revenue and is not operating at a loss. So there’s that.

Glad to hear it doesn’t sound as dire as initially rumored.

Someone I knew that was very successful once described profit as the very small number between two very large numbers. Though he reinvested nearly everything into his company which once was the largest private employer in Miami Dade County.

Good to hear. I have some complaints about GOG but I like them being around. A good service.

Looks like Slay the Spire has just released on GOG for those that want a DRM-free version.

https://www.gog.com/game/slay_the_spire

I don’t know. Clearing less than 8 grand on $34M in revenue sounds pretty dire to me.

Oh shoot! I was reading fast and (or misread) and initially thought it was 8M net profit on 34M revenue. 8k is worrisome in that context. Thanks for noting that and correcting me. Okay, back to worrying. :-(

Hope 2019 looks brighter for them.

If someone has never played a Settlers game and was considering buying one during the GOG sale, which game should they buy? Settlers IV looks like it was the most popular but that is based on a quick look at the GOG reviews, FWIW.

I also would like to know which one is best. I thought one of them had some account creation weirdness?

Also this was fun and very Settlers like just fyi. Not on sale tho.