2340: The Rise of GOG

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I remember when GOG.com — or Good Old Games, as it was originally known — first launched. It was an exciting moment, because it promised to be a storefront absolutely filled with PC games from my childhood. PC games that it had previously been near-impossible to 1) acquire in the modern era and 2) get running on modern computers. (Okay, 2 was less of an issue because DOSBox was already a thing by then, but 1 was a problem, at least, and not everyone knew how to set up DOSBox properly.)

I’ve kept my GOG.com account since launch, and just recently I find myself starting to drift more and more towards them and away from Steam. I’m not going to abandon my Steam account, obviously, since there are several hundred games in there, but GOG is starting to prove itself to be a real contender in the online digital storefront battlefield.

The GOG.com of today is a little different from when it launched, as its change in name will attest. Rather than focusing entirely on retro PC games, GOG.com now provides a mix of both retro and modern titles, and has recently even started doing “Early Access”-style games, though not to the same degree as Steam.

In fact, “not to the same degree as Steam” is a running pattern when it comes to GOG, and the platform is benefiting from it. While Steam is presently suffering from a deluge of low-quality titles released on a seemingly daily basis — the mobile app store problem, now for your home computer! — GOG.com’s marketplace is considerably more curated than Steam, and the few Early Access titles that are up on GOG are already decent quality rather than shovelware thrown out with an Early Access tag in an attempt to excuse shittiness.

In other words, discovering new games on GOG.com is a lot less of an issue than on the Steam of 2016 because you don’t have to pick through pages and pages of shitty Eastern European games with “Simulator” in the title, or perpetually Early Access Minecraft knockoffs, or games by people who don’t understand what the fundamentally appealing elements of pixel art are, or… you get the idea. This isn’t to say that there isn’t some shit on GOG, of course, but it’s far from the flood of effluent that Steam has been suffering from for a while.

And then there’s GOG’s new client, Galaxy. While still lacking a few features to put it on parity with Steam’s well-established client — most notably an in-game overlay for chat, achievements and web browsing — it’s a very good start, offering a well organised, nicely presented game library and features like playtime recording and a datestamp for the last time you played a particular title. Perhaps most notably — and most understandably, given GOG.com’s original pledge, which still holds true today, to remain a DRM-free digital storefront — is the opportunity to both automatically install games through the client a la steam and download DRM-free standalone installers for each and every game on the platform for backing up onto physical media or other hard drives. Coupled with the fact that GOG games often come with a variety of digital extras including manuals, soundtracks, artwork and all manner of other goodies, this is the next best thing to a physical copy — and if you feel strongly enough, you can even burn these installers to a CD or DVD and make your own physical copy using the materials provided. (I’m probably going to do this for the Ys games; I like them enough to want them on my actual shelves.)

GOG’s summer sale has also been excellent, with deep, generous discounts on a variety of games as well as a fun metagame that was very generous with its prizes. Rather than providing useless shit like emojis, profile backgrounds and trading cards like Steam, GOG’s summer sale metagame sees you earning experience points with each purchase and action performed on the site, with three free games on offer at various XP milestones. And they’re good games, too — specifically, Spelunky, Gabriel Knight Anniversary Edition and Dreamfall Chapters.

I anticipate I’m going to be using GOG.com a lot more in the near future; there’s still work to be done — some games promise achievements but they haven’t been implemented yet, for example — but the future looks bright for this growing storefront that refuses to compromise its principles.

Keep it up, GOG; you’ve got a loyal customer in me.

#oneaday, Day 248: All Change! Again

It’s been a curious few days for some people and things that are very dear to me. First up, you may have read my impassioned mourning of the apparent loss of Good Old Games the other day. Turns out that, as some suspected all along, the site was simply coming out of beta and relaunching. Not only that, but awesome WRPG Baldur’s Gate is coming to the site, with more to follow. This, hopefully, means that Planescape: Torment can’t be far behind. Because the one loaning incident I regret more than anything else is loaning that game to someone and never getting it back. I’m not even sure I know who borrowed it. So if you have my copy of Planescape: Torment, please return it to me. Or at least buy me a copy on GOG if/when it appears.

So that was sad and became happy, although some are still ranting and raving about GOG’s handling of the situation. Okay, it perhaps wasn’t the best PR stunt ever (some blaming that famous Polish sense of humour) but it got people talking about GOG, and it turns out that what they were planning was actually awesome. This isn’t the place for that debate, though.

The really bad news, though, is that the gaming site I’ve written daily news for and called home since March of this year, Kombo.com, is folding. This is terribly sad news as the team at Kombo are some truly talented people who worked their hardest to provide awesome content every day, whether it was opinionated twists on news coverage or original content.

Former Assistant Director of Reviews Matt Green sums the situation up over at his blog, so pay it a visit and feel free to offer commiserations either there or indeed here. I sincerely hope that everyone who was involved with Kombo lands on their feet and gets the awesome writing gig (with appropriately awesome pay) that they deserve. Note: This includes me. So if you know anywhere who needs an awesome writer who is also British (which apparently adds +1000 awesome points) then let me know. You can feel free to point them to this site—I have links to samples of my work on the menu bar above—or to http://pjedi.co.uk/links, which also has said links.

So, with that said, I think it’s time for a little light relief. The Internet provides many means of light relief, not all of which are appropriate for public consumption. (Hey, what you look at in your own time is your business. You pervert.)

By far my favourite means of light relief that the Internet provides is cat, monkey and/or dog videos, however, so I shall now share a few of my favourites. Thanks in part to Alex Connolly and Chris Person for having a link war on my Facebook profile earlier.

May I firstly present to you, courtesy of Dave Gorman on Twitter, an elephant playing darts:

Followed by the charmingly literal “A Monkey Washing A Cat.”

And then… er… this.

How about THIS?!

Andross’s enemy is my enemy!

And finishing with indisputably the best cat video on the Internet.

I thank you. For those who have had a nightmarish, difficult or stressful few days, I sincerely hope the sight of the above has cheered you, if only slightly. May tomorrow be a better day.

#oneaday, Day 245: Obituary or Rebirth?

Dear GOG users,

We have recently had to give serious thought to whether we could really keep GOG.com the way it is. We’ve debated on it for quite some time and, unfortunately, we’ve decided that GOG.com simply cannot remain in its current form.

We’re very grateful for all support we’ve received from all of you in the past two years. Working on GOG.com was a great adventure for all of us and an unforgettable journey to the past, through the long and wonderful history of PC gaming.

This doesn’t mean the idea behind GOG.com is gone forever. We’re closing down the service and putting this era behind us as new challenges await.

On a technical note, this week we’ll put in place a solution to allow everyone to re-download their games. Stay tuned to this page and follow us on Twitter and Facebook for updates.

All the best,
GOG.com Team

An hour or two ago, that message had done the rounds of the Internet. If you hadn’t seen it yet, I apologise for being the bearer of bad news. If you head on over to Good Old Games right now, that’s all you’ll see. No store. No games. No community. All gone.

For the uninitiated, Good Old Games was the place to go to purchase and download DRM-free copies of old (and not so old) classic games for low, low prices. It was, for a long time, the only place to go to find the classic Sierra adventures, or sci-fi Wolfenstein 3D spinoff Blake Stone: Aliens of Gold, or the best puzzle game of all time, The Incredible Machine. I wrote a number of pieces for that site, so yes, I have something of a vested interest in it and actually feel pretty sad about its apparent demise. But even if I didn’t have such a personal stake in it, it was a fantastic place to go to pick up the games of my youth. Even better, they’d been tweaked and optimised to work on current hardware.

The tragic news above comes after a tweet posted by the company a few days ago:

Sometimes it’s really hard being DRM-free… hard to keep things the way they are and keep management and publishers happy 🙁

It didn’t sound good. Someone was obviously putting a bit of pressure on the company, and some cracks were starting to form. Those who had supported the service since the beginning knew that a DRM-free service in an age of rampant piracy was going to have its work cut out for it. But was that really the reason?

No-one knows as yet. No-one except the people at GOG, who are playing their cards close to their chest. The community are assured that this isn’t the end of GOG, however, just the end of this chapter of its existence. Those who have purchased games from the service in the past will be directed to a “solution” to re-download these games in the next few days. And some announcements will hopefully be forthcoming very soon.

Personally speaking, I’m hoping it’s good news. There were a ton of games on the site that I’d love to have had the chance to play again. Games like Gabriel Knight 2, which a friend borrowed some time ago and never gave back, and now I can’t remember which friend it was.

The games of this era represent a time when gameplay was everything and graphics were necessarily limited by the hardware of the time. And it may just be nostalgia talking, but some of my fondest memories of childhood and adolescence come from the games I was playing at the time. It’d be shame if the memories of these games fade. But, as I say, GOG claims that this is not the end, just the end for the service in its current form.

So pour out a stiff drink, take off your hat and, I don’t know, sing a mournful song in honour of GOG or something. Hopefully they’ll be back better than ever sometime soon.

Rest in peace, GOG. For a little while. Then come back as an awesome zombie who wants to sell us old games rather than eat our brains.

WHATAREYABUYIN’?

One A Day, Day 10: On The Edge

Part the First

Horrible day today. The behaviour of the children is getting worse and worse and I feel powerless to do anything about it. Probably because I am powerless to do anything about it. My predecessor apparently used to “bellow” at them every so often to get them to be quiet, but last time I bellowed at them (which got the point across nicely, incidentally) I ended up being the one getting told off for it. Which is pretty ridiculous, really.

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again. Children respond to shock tactics and humiliation. The stupid culture of reward that is instilled in modern education now does not achieve anything. When you reward children for everything, including sitting down on a chair (I’m not joking) all rewards completely lose their impact and all you’re left with are punishments… which don’t work because the kids don’t respect adults. It’s a complete no-win situation and short of a drastic shakeup of the education system, I don’t see a way forward. But it’s not politically correct to punish children. It’s not even politically correct to shout at them any more. Teachers are impotent in the face of poor behaviour.

Take one kid in my class. I won’t use his real name. Let’s call him Jack. No, actually, let’s call him Cock. Because he is.

Cock has a difficult home life – one of those indecipherable ones involving domestic violence and on-off relationships. As a result (apparently) he’s become the person he is – rude, argumentative, confrontational, violent, cheeky and lazy. The school he’s at now – where I teach him – was about his third in the space of a couple of months when he arrived.

I can’t do anything with him. And when he chooses to kick off, he drags the rest of the class along with him. Because, being kids, they find it hilarious when he lies on the floor, or runs around chasing people, or starts shouting “The Pakistanis are coming!”. In a school with a rather large ethnic minority population.

And there’s nothing you can do about it. He’s been spoken to by me and senior members of staff at the school. His parents have been spoken to. He’s had letters home. He has special sessions with teaching assistants. Yet still he’s an asshole. His home life is used as a constant excuse for his shitty behaviour. And while it may upset him, that’s still not an excuse. There’s too much hand-wringing over what are delightfully termed “challenging” children. They should suffer the consequences of poor behaviour just like everyone else. Except no-one else really suffers any consequences either.

Right. Starting to see the problem here.

Still, after handing in my written resignation I calculated today that I only have 51 days until my escape – only 35 of which are actually teaching days. Which is nice. Beginning to wish I had just given them a week’s notice and buggered off.

Part the Second

So Apple finally announced the iPad, the official name of the “Apple tablet” which everyone has inexplicably known about for months. And already there are painfully unfunny jokes going around about the “iTampon”. I may just be grumpy because of a shit day, but I don’t find that even a little bit funny – largely because we’ve had things called “[something] pad” for years and no-one has ever commented. My estimation of the intelligence of the Internet has just dropped a notch, and I’m reminded of something Mark Whiting of the Squadron of Shame said on our Deus Ex podcast – “Back in ’99 we all thought the Internet would turn into SkyNet. This was before we knew it would turn into 4Chan.”

As for the device itself… it’s a big iPhone which, at this time, I have no interest in owning. I like proper computers too much to even consider a tablet. Call me a traditionalist.

Part the Third

At the time of writing, in 12 hours’ time, there will be something exciting announced on Good Old Games. They have been cock-teasing everybody for the last few days on Facebook and Twitter… tomorrow we’ll get to finally find out what the big news is. I’m certainly intrigued. You should be too.

Now it’s late. Time for bed for me. This entry has been fragmented, but so has my brain. I really don’t want to have to go in and deal with those kids again tomorrow… but I have to just keep counting down to first freedom and then an undoubtedly awesome time at PAX East. I can’t wait. For either thing.

Good night.

Changing Course

Hello everyone and thanks for stopping by, as always!

In an effort to write more on this site, I’ve decided to change tack a little from past entries. This blog started as a purely personal blog and gradually morphed into mostly games-related stuff. And fair enough, it’s a principal hobby of mine. But I have all these unused categories going free at the top of the page so I thought I’d branch out and try to write a bit more on some other topics to give all of you lovely readers the opportunity to get to know me a bit better in some other areas. Plus, you never know, I might even pick up some more readers along the way – this was clearly demonstrated a while back when I reviewed Haunted Stereo live at the Hobbit (cue Pingback on myself… ’cause no-one else ever links to me :)) and I met a whole bunch of fine new folks as a result.

So from this week forwards, this blog will be… a blog, as opposed to a games blog. You’ll still find games writing here, of course, but there are plenty of other things I’d like to talk about. My last few video games articles have also been posted over on Bitmob, so do go check me out (and comment!) over there if you like what you see. You’ll also see a couple of my articles on Good Old Games, which should be your first destination for picking up… well, good old games. Check out my articles on Rise of the Triad and Simon the Sorcerer.

Right. On to other matters.

My Dan and Charlie project that I discussed in my last post has been proceeding nicely. It’s been fun to “roleplay” these two characters and imagine the situations they have been getting into and how they interact. In practice, it has also been an interesting experiment in separating out various facets of my own personality into two separate people. Those who know me well will have already spotted this, but I also think it’s a potentially interesting way of telling a story from different perspectives. My research on the subject is admittedly limited, but does anyone know if anything similar has been done before, outside of ARGs such as Perplex City? (Perplex City is, I confess, where I got the idea from in the first place, although those characters’ stories were rather less mundane) I’d be intrigued to see how other people have approached it.

That’s it for now. Like I say, this change in approach is largely an excuse to get me writing more on a broader variety of different topics, so assuming I have a bit of self-discipline about this I’m sure I can find something interesting to say on a semi-regular basis. I hope I don’t disappoint. 🙂