I also want to note that games from GOG.com are DRM-free. That is, there are no serial numbers, no activation licenses, no nasty extra files or processes that the games run behind the scenes, etc. None of that crap.

I'm about to order psychonauts. Been way too long since I played it. Grabbed my free Empire Earth this morning as soon as the deal went live. I was camping their twitter for news all morning, lol.

Fuck. Too many bundles. Like seriously.

I'd never even heard of Indie Gala, and indie royale didn't e-mail me about the new one this time. I'm really going to have to start picking and choosing which ones I get now, instead of just buying them on impulse as soon as they come out.

Might skip on the indie royale this time, doesn't look like there's anything I really want. I'm going to be doing a little bit of poking around looking at the games in the indie gala before I maybe/maybe not get that one though. Pretty attractive website to say the least.

To be honest, I don't know if I'm going to buy this Indie Royale bundle either. I want to save some of my extra funds for the upcoming Steam holiday sales.

Re: this new Indie Royale bundle:

I watched some Blackwell Let's Plays on YouTube and... I don't know. I just can't get into those point-and-click adventure games very much. (Looked cool for fans of the genre though! Maybe it will grow on me.) I watched the Eets trailer on the Indie Royale site and had no goddamn idea what was going on, so I couldn't come to a conclusion if I'd like it or not. If I'm going to play a multiplayer game on the source engine I'm going to play CS:Source or TF2, not Dino D-Day, lol. (Dino might develop a nice multiplayer community out of these bundle sales though which could lure me in.) I love simulation games so I might end up buying the bundle just for The Oil Blue. Not too interested in the subject matter though, to be honest.

Dino D-Day is awful. I played it over the free weekend they had for it on Steam recently and wow. There is no way I would EVER pay for this game.

Fun fact: Did you know Indie Royale is actually a desura thing? I noticed it when I was paying through paypal last time.

I think I still have Empire Earth if I can find the disk and it doesn't have a cd key. It was good but not as good as AoE 1.

Also there is some serious nostalgia looking at those games. Far Cry, Lords of Magic, Myst, SimCity, SWAT 3, Tropico. FFS They even have UT 2004 which I didnt even know people actually bought because you could play the online demo version for free.

The best thing about old PC games were the manuals. I swear they used to come with encyclopedia-sized manuals. The Age 1 manual, for instance, was great bathroom reading material back in the day. The entire 2nd half of the ~100-page book was a historical perspective on the rise and fall of the various civilizations implemented in the game. I bought SimCity 2000 the day I bought my first PC. No joke - it came with 2 manuals books that total about 300 pages.

mrseasonsaltz wrote:

I think I still have Empire Earth if I can find the disk and it doesn't have a cd key. It was good but not as good as AoE 1.

Age of Empires 1 was incredible. I love all of the games in the Age series - well, except the newest nickel-and-dimer Age Of Empires Online which I didn't bother with. These days AoE 1 doesn't hold up well because due to technical limitations at the time (read: PCs were shit back then), the game was only balanced for a 50-unit pop cap. You can set up a VS. map and increase the pop limit further, but the AI scripts are only built to go up to 50, so after a certain point, the computer players just stand around waiting to die. Sucks.

Age 2 has aged much better in that respect. There are tons of custom map types and AI scripts that have been developed for it. I didn't like the map types in Age Of Mythology (thought the maps were too simple and formulaic) so I actually spent a weekend learning how to write a random map script - via an informative .txt file on the install CD - and modified some map types to my liking. Age 3 has a lot of complaints, most notably too much going on and the fact that RTS games in general were growing stale by then. However, I love the New World setting for it (really lends itself well to the various map types), so I bought it on Day 1. Problem for me was that by late 2005 I had already gotten hooked on this game called Guild Wars and the rest is history.



As I mentioned in an earlier post in this thread, at the time RTS games were VERY popular. However, all of the games only dealt with a certain era. Empire Earth really drew attention by how ambitious it was in covering all time periods of history. It didn't really do any area exceptionally well, IIRC from the reviews at the time. More like a 'jack of all trades' type of game for RTS lovers. A few years later a game called Rise Of Nations came out and handled the wide historical scope a lot better - not to mention the Risk-styled world map of conquest was awesome as hell. I think I still have my Rise Of Nations CD around here somewhere too. That game pissed me off though. You can eventually get strong enough to build nuclear bombs, but before I could ever launch them the goddamn AI would research the Nuclear Arms Non-Proliferation Treaty which would actually prevent you from using them altogether. (You bastards! I only wanted to nuke your shit. What's the holdup? )