Game News King of Dragon Pass Released on GOG

[kaizoku]

By early windows I meant stuff like win 3.1, redbook audio, cd swapping, winG, intel indeo...

May just be my ignorance but I don't think there's any easy way of obviating these issues (unlike with dos games) and gog seem to know what they're doing here.

I lost you there.
Which games are you referring to?
Can you or The Brazilian Slaughter clarify?

 

[Transgressive Grenadier]

Betrayal in Antara, HoMM 2?

 

[Turjan]

The elder "The Elder scrolls" games

If you mean Arena and Daggerfall, then Bethesda has released these for free.

Yup. It's surprising how many people don't know this. The games are pretty easy to get to run, too.

older Blizzard games

Pretty sure Blizzard will never work with a digital distributor that isn't Battle.net

Given how they love to sell even their oldest games at very high prices, I think we will not see this anytime soon.

 

[Turjan]

Betrayal in Antara, HoMM 2?

Betrayal in Antara is included in the Betrayal at Krondor Pack, so it's available on gog.com.

 

[commie]

Betrayal in Antara, HoMM 2?

Betrayal in Antara is included in the Betrayal at Krondor Pack, so it's available on gog.com.

Yeah the point TG was making was that BAA were a bit problematic to get going being early windows and GOG got it working pretty well. I'd like to see GOG take on Command Aces of the Deep and other early Windows games that are impossible to play now unless you are running native Win 95/98 on an appropriate PC to boot.

 

[Turjan]

Betrayal in Antara, HoMM 2?

Betrayal in Antara is included in the Betrayal at Krondor Pack, so it's available on gog.com.

Yeah the point TG was making was that BAA were a bit problematic to get going being early windows and GOG got it working pretty well. I'd like to see GOG take on Command Aces of the Deep and other early Windows games that are impossible to play now unless you are running native Win 95/98 on an appropriate PC to boot.

Oh, I see. Actually, while I got Betrayal at Antara as part of the BaK Pack, I didn't get it to run on my computer, unlike BaK. I haven't really looked into it yet, but yes, it seems difficult.

 

[commie]

Betrayal in Antara, HoMM 2?

Betrayal in Antara is included in the Betrayal at Krondor Pack, so it's available on gog.com.

Yeah the point TG was making was that BAA were a bit problematic to get going being early windows and GOG got it working pretty well. I'd like to see GOG take on Command Aces of the Deep and other early Windows games that are impossible to play now unless you are running native Win 95/98 on an appropriate PC to boot.

Oh, I see. Actually, while I got Betrayal at Antara as part of the BaK Pack, I didn't get it to run on my computer, unlike BaK. I haven't really looked into it yet, but yes, it seems difficult.

I got lucky it seems. BaA worked pretty well for me, running Win 7 32bit on an old Core2Duo with an ATI 4770. Of course your mileage may vary. This old machine of mine is falling apart but i'm loathe to replace it because pretty much everything runs on it. Haven't had any of the problems others have had running old or new stuff. Seems that the mix of hardware just gels right and the drivers for it don't have any conflicts with anything else.

 

[DakaSha]

Wonder how they got around the copy protection, since the devs lost their source code...

What? There has been a new and enhanced version for ipad for some time now. as a matter of fact they are still working on it (And it's superior to the pc version)

 

[kaizoku]

They didn't lose the source code.

Those guys were/are smart and back in the day they wrote their own scripting language. Then they used a paid framework that allowed them to build for windows and mac.
It's that framework that is now dead and gone for eons.

 

[SCO]

Don't you wonder why it's 'superior' if they have a shared code base:
they don't, they remade it

 

[kaizoku]

they remade the artwork

the game logic remains the same (maybe some minor improvements)

 

[Gragt]

And it lost some stuff, some by design and some by limitations. Besides if it's so superior, it should be on the superior platform. Even The Brazilian Slaughter, who is usually insensitive to that sort of thing, agrees.

 

[TheCatsofSanktPetersburg]

This is my favorite game of all time. So many good ideas. So much talent. So much replayability. So much imagination.

Truly a gem of no equal.

 

[CrustyBot]

Never played this before, but there's a first time for everything. Bought, downloaded and installed.

Thanks for the announcement, Crooked Bee.

 

[kaizoku]

For those with an iThingie you may also want to look into that version.
They fixed some bugs and added some new (minor?) content.

 

[Grunker]

I'm playing this now. It's really fun, and though it's hard to master the mechanics are quite easy to learn if you take the time to go through the tutorial.

So far, I'm having a blast.

 

[Gragt]

For those interested, it seems that the soundtrack is freely available on composer Stan LePard's Soundcloud. You can also get it with the GOG release but it's likely in mp3 while this one is available for everyone and in wav, probably lossless and easily convertible in your favourite audio format.

 

[asper]

Wow, thanks for that find Gragt! Just this excellent soundtrack alone is worth more than what GoG is asking for the whole game.

http://soundcloud.com/stanlepard/05-sea-season

 

[Grunker]

The soundtrack is part of GoG's release too.

Anyway, I've played through my first game. I didn't lose outright, but things got bad enough that I decided to start over now that I'd learned some stuff. I actually did kindda better than I thought. From the tidbits I'd read on the Codex I was very afraid that I wouldn't be able to manage food, but it actually went alright even thought most years started with "you will have horrible harvest lol" (does this normally happen so often, by the way?).

I didn't do that well in fighting at first, but was helped along later by practice and the aid of first Hukmat's standard and then a standard that allowed me to maneuver better. Hukmat's is pretty insane, by the way.

In the end I couldn't get enough cattle, and didn't manage my relations with other clans well enough. By the way, Heroquests are fucking awesome. The fact that you have to read up on lore and then use it on the quest is just great design. I almost never read the lore found in books in RPG's, because there is no incentive too, but here gameplay and lore flows together fantastically. I did fail both times I actually got into the God Plane though, not precisely sure why. Got my clan-member out both times though.

Will definetely be playing this more, hopefully I can get better at it.

 

[Gragt]

Yes, I saw that the soundtrack was available with the GOG release of the game, but I assumed it is one of their standard mp3 CBR soundtracks. The one I linked is more than probably lossless and you can convert it to whatever you want.

 

[Quilty]

The soundtrack is part of GoG's release too.

Anyway, I've played through my first game. I didn't lose outright, but things got bad enough that I decided to start over now that I'd learned some stuff. I actually did kindda better than I thought. From the tidbits I'd read on the Codex I was very afraid that I wouldn't be able to manage food, but it actually went alright even thought most years started with "you will have horrible harvest lol" (does this normally happen so often, by the way?).

I didn't do that well in fighting at first, but was helped along later by practice and the aid of first Hukmat's standard and then a standard that allowed me to maneuver better. Hukmat's is pretty insane, by the way.

In the end I couldn't get enough cattle, and didn't manage my relations with other clans well enough. By the way, Heroquests are fucking awesome. The fact that you have to read up on lore and then use it on the quest is just great design. I almost never read the lore found in books in RPG's, because there is no incentive too, but here gameplay and lore flows together fantastically. I did fail both times I actually got into the God Plane though, not precisely sure why. Got my clan-member out both times though.

Will definetely be playing this more, hopefully I can get better at it.

IIRC you can fail heroquests even if you know them by heart because your magic is weak, or your hero is not up to the task, or you don't have enough allies helping you etc. I think I remember reading that all this may lead to the game not offering you the correct answer or providing an unwanted outcome even if you know what the answer is supposed to be.

 

[User was nabbed fit]

I loved this game. Might give me a reason to sign up to GoG.