This sounds wonderful. Right now I can’t wait for GK whole trilogy to be complete and for Interstate 76…hopefully that one is also under AV. It would be great to have a list of games AV has rights to : ).
nKoan
1983
Arcanum and Gabriel Knight 1 are both now available, and I am seriously considering getting both right now. Even though I have disk version of both around here somewhere.
I never did get to play Gabriel Knight. I can’t wait to get to it.
I purchased both, but I am really looking forward to playing Gabriel. It looks like it’s the talk version because the download is 370 megs.
Vampire: The Masquerade: Redemption is this week’s Activision release, along with some other game called Dark Fall 2: Lights Out.
I didn’t even know there was an older Vampire game before Bloodlines.
DF2 is an indie point and click adventure game that is well worth playing. The UI can be a bit clunky, but the story and puzzles are generally quite good.
I remember being really excited to play this – I was a teenager and big into the Vampire line of games (though without the pretentiousness that seemed assumed by the setting – we were very surprised to find out that not everyone played Vampire and Mage like they were bad action movies). I remember being very disappointed, very fast.
But that’s really all I remember. It’s possible that I had terrible taste at the age of 18. I DID play Vampire, after all.
My experience with Redemption was that the launcher crashed my computer.
Bloodlines is way closer to the P&P game. Redemption is a clunky and wildly mechanically unfaithful Diablo-like, the main virtue being it tried to have a multiplayer mode where a Storyteller could put together a virtual adventure for players. Kind of like Neverwinter Nights, except clunkier.
The story, surprisingly, is reasonably decent and works in all sorts of World of Darkness lore. Hell, a later Brujah clan sourcebook actually listed the PC of the game as a famous Brujah.
But as a game? No. You’re better off with the LP of the game done by a SomethingAwful poster named Coulis. It’s what I’ve been following.
At the time, I thought it was a decent Diablo clone. I also liked Darkstone, which was another 3d Diablo clone.
True story: That’s the only game I’ve ever played where the opening dungeon is a maze, and I couldn’t find my way out, even though I tried for a couple of hours. First I tried the right hand rule, keeping a pretend hand on the wall and always turning right when I could. Then I tried the left hand rule, always turning left. And neither worked. I know I must have just been missing some little exit to the maze somewhere, but it was infuriating not to be able to get out of the opening maze. FUCK Vampire: The Masquerade: The Redemption.
Craig_O
1993
Crossing my fingers that Bloodlines is coming soon. I bought it when it came out but never put much time into it. I tried going back recently, but it wouldn’t run on 64-bit Vista.
Across two separate computers and sub-configurations (3 or 4 video cards, 3 sound cards), I never got Darkstone to work. Once.
Everyone oohs and aahs about Bloodlines, so I suppose I’ll grab it if it comes out on GoG. What year did it come out originally?
Bloodlines is fucking awesome. I like some of the fan patches for it, though. One of them fixed auspex, so that you could leave it on all the time and it didn’t cost blood (just a toggle). That was the rule in the PnP, and I thought it fit. I mean it’s auspex! It’s not like it gave you a major combat advantage.
Yeah for me Bloodlines is one of 5 games made in last 15 years I would give 10/10. So what if it was buggy? Bugs were at least mostly fixed. Troika released incredible buggy games that had such a devoted fans that those fans fixed their games afterwards.Not every company has such dedicated following.
walTer
1999
This…and you are missing something really great if you don’t play it. Also there is a fan made patch that is in the hundreds of megs that fixes just about every bug out there…as I recall there was a fairly recent update to it as well.
I assume the patch would work with the GOG version.
It should, it works with the Steam version.
I used a fan patch for the GOG release of M&M6.
