With GOG, it’s best to wait a few days after a release, then go to the forums and see if there are any major issues. I had to wait months for the Gothics to work (Nvidia’s fault, really), Journeyman Project was bugged (couldn’t save) amd Disciples 1 still freezes up all the time. Arx Fatalis had some wierd issues as well.
I love GOG, but I’ve grown wary of day-one purchases.
If WC 1 and 2 work with a mouse-keyboard combination, I am very glad to see those. I’m not sure any game has ever grabbed me the way those did, way back when.
Played DK2 a bit on my lunch break. I have 2 monitors, and I found that if I had anything going on on the secondary screen, I’d have “flashing” going on on the game screen. Quitting out and restarting seemed to solve it. Otherwise, everything is working great.
Welp, thanks to GoG, I now own all the PC-based Wing Commander games, which should help with my project. ;) I loaded up 1, and it asked me if I wanted the Vega Campaign or the Secret Missions, so it looks like it might have the expansion with it. It can be played with a mouse, but it’s funky because the game kinda moves really fast, so I’ll have to play around with DOSBox.
2 offers no choice of campaign like 1 did, so I’m unsure if it includes the expansions, and mouse control is a little worse than in 1 because in 2, the mouse only controls roll, not pitch and yaw like in 1. 2 also includes the full voice over package, but since it was also moving too fast, these quickly got out of sync.
I’ll tell ya though, when the game loaded and I saw that silhouetted orchestra for the first time in over a decade, I totally got chills.
I didn’t know there was a Donkey Kong 2
GoG kinda shit all over themselves with these releases. Not as bad as, say, I’76, but still not good.
WC1+WC2 include no expansions. They’re basically a dump of a mid-90s CD bundle straight to DOSBox. This is a problem. Legions of people have been trying to get WC1/2 to work “perfectly” in DOSBox for a long, long time, and they still haven’t achieved it. The biggest problem is variable speed. Because of game timing, you can’t keep your DOSBox cycles at one value. If you do, some parts are slow, others too fast. Not good. GoG should have tried to get the Kilrathi Saga (Win-native) versions of the games, or failing that just not should have bothered.
DK2 is also disappointing. They basically dumped a DRM-stripped version of the “EA Classics” CD (which I already have) and the 1.7 patch. DK2 has a lot of issues with modern O/Ses, and unfortunately GoG’s DK2 release has the exact same issues.
To be honest, more crap like this, and GoG is rapidly losing its luster. I don’t feel the need to pay even small amounts of money to folks who do a quick, nasty ctrl-c ctrl-v job when I have gigs of abandonware available that provide the exact same experience.
GOG continues to do well with other publishers’ games though, so any reticence clearly seems to be coming from the EA side of things. I guess it then boils down to whether getting something is better than nothing.
(Edit: I am still kind of personally disappointed, though. I haven’t bought any of the EA games yet because I already got most of them working in DOSBox myself, and would have wanted them for the extras and expansions that we didn’t get.)
GOG continues to do well with other publishers’ games though
They do ok. My previously-mentioned I’76 was one that frankly shouldn’t have been released. A really nasty DRM bug slipped through in Moto Racer 2 that gives one the unsettling suspicion that the GoG testers don’t play their releases all the way through before release. They’re still the biggest and best kids on the block, but they’ve had their missteps.
I think it’s time to release another apology video dressed as monks.
Does the WC bundle include the expansions and the speech pack? The description doesn’t mention them.
No.
While I am an original and current fan of GoG, I too have become very cautious about buying their older games before waiting a few weeks to read up on what they’re actually providing. I also learned w/ I-76. For troublesome games, I can wait until there’s a half-price sale or just dig out some old collector’s edition I bought years ago. Or go to another site.
For folks still on the fence with DK2: using imagecfg on the dkii.exe file to set single-cpu affinity fixes most graphical problems (as it did with the CD version). There’s still WTFs like clicking on the objective button causing a CTD, and random CTDs throughout. This is on a Win7x64 AMD laptop.
Any guesses what the next six EA titles might be, based on the ultra-blurry boxshots?
I am really hoping that the second blurry boxshot is Wasteland, and it does kind of look like it. I know Brian Fargo got the rights to the series from EA a couple years back, but maybe they worked something out here?
Please let it be Wasteland.
Wasteland would be a nice addition to their catalog. I spent many hours playing it.
Another EA game I spent a lot of time playing back in the day was [I]Centurion: Defender of Rome[/I]. But there were many, many EA titles I played a lot.
Where do you see those boxshots? I wouldn’t mind taking a peek. :)
Those don’t look like blurry box covers to me, they just look like a bunch of colors.
Yeah, sure, but one of them is brown. Name some brown EA games of yore.
Hell yeah, that was awesome, and totally the game that got me interested in the Roman Empire - It even has Scipio Africanus in it!
Unfortunately, it seems that games THAT old don’t get taken into the GOG family unless they are of a certain level of fame