Gog.com Soon On More Platforms
gog.com
gog.com
Also, it'll be interesting to see if it's a plan to bring more indie/kickstarter, since most of them have linux version planned, so GOG was not ideal.
[1] You can read all their reasons here: http://www.gog.com/forum/general/letter_from_the_md_about_re... Yep, that's 5 pages of answer from staff members.
Loki's Alpha Centauri port was the game that didn't make me miss Windows anymore.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loki_Software#Games_published
That list is pretty much all I'll ever need.
I really like what Loki did. It's a shame they were too early to market.
In the long term I suspect the best option for SMAC is a binary reverse-engineer and re-implement. The original game has a number of bugs ( http://www.civgaming.net/smac/acad_buglist.shtml ) and isn't even a very good Windows port (it uses a crazy 16-colour video mode that really doesn't like alt-tab).
Or we could run a kickstarter to open source it ..
Only problem will be having more games to distract me, I went with Linux to avoid needing the willpower to not play games and get on with learning / working ;-)
Note that there is no reason that I can see that this wouldn't simultaneously make the same software available for OS X and any other system that can run Wine.
> I went with Linux to avoid needing the willpower to not play games and get on with learning / working ;-)
heh
I think that's mostly aimed at ames that are currently in development.
I prefer running games in WINE anyway. It provides a bit of extra security and it can run fullscreen-only games in a window.
GOG is a good platform. They don't always have the cheapest offer (not even for "their" games, Witcher 1 und 2), but they have a good mission, being DRM free. And it was about time there was a good place for buying the classics, computer games are old enough for that now (so older games are not automatically too old to enjoy if you didn't grow up with them).
And think about the perspective. 2 years ago, there was nothing if you wanted to reliably play games on linux, apart from the few old games released for that OS and the few good FOSS-indie games. Wine is nice, but not reliable. Now there is the humble bundle, there is Steam, and there is also GOG - three good options, two of them without DRM, all of them not expensive.
It starts to become viable to get rid of Windows even if you are a gamer (I'll probably wait for League of Legends and Planetside 2 though, but only because I have Windows 7 already installed. If that breaks, why bother?).
> This is, of course, going to include games that we sell which already have Linux clients, but we'll also be bringing Linux gamers a variety of classics that are, for the first time, officially supported and maintained by a storefront like ours.
Even if this is via e.g. dosemu, it'd still be offering something new compared to storefronts that already have Linux support.
However, there are a lot of games where it feels like they should work on linux, but they just don't. For instance, Interstate76 runs fine in PlayOnLinux, but Interstate82 doesn't. There are probably a bunch of those games where the GOG team is in a position to make it work under linux whereas we users alone can't.
I'm excited. Even if they'll just push the games that already run through PlayOnLinux, official support and the publicity are both worth it.
Yeah but for those that have no native linux clients that's not an officially supported way to play them, neither from GOG nor from other retailers.
The reason it matters is not for people like the typical HN user but for, say, my dad which is now using a linux laptop and plays some GOG games on it from "his past" but isn't technical enough to know how to fix it when there is a slight unimportant mis-configuration. If I wasn't there, he wouldn't be able to.
Game only works on a particular version of Wine? No problem, POL will install that specific Wine version for this game without any adverse effect on the other games.
I do not understand why they keep (kept?) bundling the games' datafiles with the emulators/runtimes.
That's one of the primary reasons to use GOG - even the ancient games they sell (in my experience) Just Work. They would be far, far less successful if every customer had to become an expert in DOSBOX in order to play an impulse buy of a game from their youth.