Hilarious Misadventures in GOGland

by arbitrarywater

For those out of the know, Good Old Games is having an absolutley stupidly huge sale right now. While it's not quite Steam "Bioshock for a dollar" level of madness, you can get all 5 infinity engine games for $7 each. Unfortunately, I already own all the Infinity Engine games, digitally or no, as well as some of the other premiere titles on that site, such as Heroes of Might and Magic III. Thus, the titles I actually purchased are flaky and weird enough to warrant me blogging about it. And also, so I can be on the community spotlight for another week in a row (this is for you ZombiePie). No video this week, as the titles included are of a somewhat less DOS-oriented nature and I lack video capture software. If you care so much, watch a LP on the youtubes.

Master of Orion 3

Somehow, I think I'd rather play Alpha Protocol. That's an insult. Ouch. Master of Orion 3, is one of those rare sequels that manages to destroy and ignore what made the prior games good in exchange for heading in it's own delusional direction. Admittedly, I've played for a grand total of about 3 hours but that's really all I need to see in order to make the kind of shallow, surface judgments that these kinds of blogs are comprised of. It's bad. How bad? BAD. Boring bad. Disappointingly bad. Not fun bad. I bought this game as a curiosity piece, and It's as bad as everyone says it is.

First of all, Master of Orion 3 practically plays itself, Final Fantasy XII style. Sure, to those who liked FF XII, that might not seem bad, but this is somehow worse, not being a MMO derivative JRPG. This is a 4X strategy game, and micromanagement is the norm. Certainly, the game isn't going to stop you from micromanaging the individual planets of a system, but because there is a serious lack of any sort of helpful instruction or documentation (not to mention feedback) on what to do, not to mention the computer seems to do fairly well on its own as long as you give it the proper guidance (FARM planets should probably build more farms). Thus, we are left with a game that is all macro-management and poorly designed interface. Did I mention that the interface is super clunky and unattractive? Well, it is. But perhaps the most soul-crushing thing about MOO 3 is that it has no personality. The first two games, for all their quirks, certainly had that. This is static screen land.
WILL NOT PLAY AGAIN.

Divine Divinity

At first, I was going to be all "Yo, it's Diablo" but then I realized that it's kind of not Diablo and that Torchlight is still the most egregious offender in the "Far too much like Diablo for me to want to play it, knowing fully well that Diablo 2 is better" category. Instead, as far as I can tell, DD is far more open world and European (Belgian, actually). Which sounds pretty awesome, to be sure. Withholding opinion until I can actually get some serious time in it.

Realms of Arkania 3

Yeah, continuing the saga of self-hate.... wait a second. I actually think this game seems alright. As you might remember, I fully rebuffed the first two games for being totally incomprehensible. While this game still uses the maddeningly complicated "Das Swarze Ague" as its ruleset of choice, the game does a far better job of actually telling me what to do (even though I still have to refer to the PDF manual). I couldn't get the video to capture, but it's also not bound to a grid, and as far as I can tell the encounters aren't nearly as random. Consider me impressed. I still should probably finish Icewind Dale first though.

Other games

I also bought backup copies of Heroes of Might and Magic 1 and Baldur's Gate 2, just in case the disks burst into flame or something. Sure, Heroes 1 is not nearly as good as any of its successors, but it happens to have one of my favorite town themes in any Heroes game.

Oh, and as a special treat, here's something that I didn't find on GOG...

Baldur's Gate. PS1 Version.

While I have mostly reformed from my questionably-legal ways of obtaining games, hearing that the prototype of this unreleased console port was leaked on the internet had me investigating it, and obtaining it. Now while PC to Console ports have always been of varying quality (ranging from "It doesn't have mouse support" to "Just get a better PC if you want to play it so bad"), it's understandable why this port was canceled. It's not very good. In fact, I would say that it's aggressively not good. To use a comparison, the difference between my 1920x1080 using the BG 2 version of the engine Baldur's Gate and this version is about the same as a late-80s Arcade game to 2600 port. The graphics are super-low resolution and significantly scaled down, the interface elements obviously weren't finished in this version (as it will tell you when it is spawning creatures in the dialog box), there is no voice acting other than the between chapter narrations, the controls are really bad, and the game has a totally different soundtrack and soundset. It's an interesting curosity, but not one that you should play (although, its apparently playable from start to finish), as the actual product is far, far, far superior. Hoping that the next time the prototype of an unreleased PS1 game is leaked, they can have the dignity to leak Resident Evil 1.5. I would do bad things to my PS2 so I could play "backup copies" of PS1 games if that came out.

Oh, and happy holidays. Or whatever.