In celebration, I dug up my old physical copy expecting to have to go through a lot of hassle to get it working. I’m actually astonished that the CD works perfectly right out of the box.
Yeah, mana shield and turning things to stone and shattering them allows you to breeze through the game solo very quickly even on the hardest difficulty.
Spring sale kicked off, it has daily flash deals!
I hope all those who support competition among marketplaces so strongly are willing to put their money where their mouth is, and buy from a store that’s been competing fairly for a long time.
“Rune Classic” at $2 is pretty tempting. I hated the demo back when it was released, but I saw someone playing that game in the early 2000s and they were throwing axes to kill people left and right! I hated the demo because it was all melee only, which I didn’t enjoy. I had no idea you’d be killing things at range later with throwing axes.
Talking about some real competition for a change, all DOSBox games will now have cloud saving on GOG.
OMG what? That means I can stop manually backing up my TIE Fighter pilot every time I play?!
That’s fantastic news. I want to throw a few dollars at GOG in support.
Anyone know if these games aged well?
Albion
Land of Lores
Ultima Underworlds
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.
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.