Well, I’d meant to review the Sideway Demo this week. And it looked so cool too. A platformer where one runs, jumps, and fights one’s way through hoards of grafitti monsters on the walls and roofs of urban buildings. As in, a game where one plays across every surface of a city and fighting the collective works of spray-painters everywhere. I knew from the moment I found the thing on Steam that I’d be reviewing it for this column.
But for some unknown reason, Steam refuses to run the demo. Even when I deleted the file and downloaded the demo a second time, my computer refuses to run the thing. And I was hyped up to play it too. Instead, I downloaded the demo for Waves, an arcade shooter I think that’s supposed to be easy to learn but difficult to master. Except I had barely gotten onto the main menu before the game started chugging at an abysmal frame rate. Even Xotic, a graphics intensive FPS, didn’t have such slowdowns on the main menu!
And then I thought of playing one of the demos I already had on the computer, Might and Magic: Clash of Heroes. But I got to the screen to learn the controls of the game, and I realized I had long since stopped caring. I was in no mood to learn about how to play the game, and then struggle for an hour adapting to it. Is that lazy or unprofessional? Perhaps, but if nothing else the game wouldn’t have received a favorable review from me given my frustration at the time, so it’s probably for the best.
What can we learn from this? That it’s best, when studying something with the intent of writing on it for work, that one not wait until the day one needs it written to actually look at the subject. You never know if the program won’t run or the source will be unavailable. Invaluable lesson to be learned for college and life.
Given that, I could just leave it at that and knock off for the weekend. In the interest of professionalism, however, I will offer something else for the pleasure of my readers. Let me tell you about gog.com.
Good Old Games, or simply GOG, is a site where one can download a number of old PC games at a low price. We’re not just talking games released last year, either. We’re talking select PC games (the library is unfortunately not comprehensive) from as far back as the early 90s. The only five games available for free are all point-and-click adventure games from that era.
By the way, haven’t had the chance to fiddle with those free games yet. I might come back with my thoughts on those at a later date.
I think the best part about GOG is that pretty much all of the titles available cost only a few dollars. A vast majority cost between six and ten dollars, which given the price of most games nowadays is a veritable steal. The single exception, the one game that runs for more than that is The Witcher 2, released earlier this year and running for $40. This confused me just a bit as to why it’s the only recent game and the only one at such a price. That is until I found out the game was made by CD Projekt RED, who also own GOG. So it makes sense the company would want to promote its own title.
Not to mention the download version of that game is the only one without any pesky DRM. Yes, GOG’s game catalog is DRM free. None of that stuff the games industry at large has been pushing to protect game sales by inconveniencing customers. So if for no other reason, I’d like you to support GOG for its stance on DRM.
Which is not to say this isn’t a great site without being DRM free. This is a fantastic idea, and I support it wholeheartedly. Just because a game is old doesn’t mean it isn’t worth playing. I would argue that the industry would benefit from looking backwards at what old games did right, given the amount of stagnation it’s experiencing.
Major Boon: History. Specifically of computer science, since I’ll bet my bottom dollar (though I probably wouldn’t need to spend that much) that a good chunk of these games are rich in old gaming conventions, computer know-how, and bugs. If you wanted to be a PC gamer during that era, you learned a lot about how a computer works.
#Campuslife 