Don't feel sorry! I gave it a good run, but it became very repetitive and challenging to me. Which drove me mad.

I was hoping to tackle giant beasts or something to keep it fresh, but besides a few instances, it was just the addition of more armor. I don't have the mouse-eye coordination or reflexes to get my weapon where I wanted it, so I'd swing wildly which just doesn't cut it a few hours in.

The part of the game that I liked was that it was new for me, fresh. Nothing I'd ever played was like it and it gave me the thing I always want in action games: strategic battle. I just wasn't good enough for it.

I fully understand why people love the game. I'm just not good enough at games to be able to beat the thing (same goes for lots of games - I still haven't beaten Bowser in 8-4 and can't progress part the gargoyles in dark souls or even understand how to do anything in crusader Kings 2. Some games, I'm just not meant to finish.)

Anyway, again, don't feel bad. I had a great time, tried a game I always wanted to try, got maybe a third of the way through and then got stuck. I enjoyed the start, was driven mad inching through progress, and decided it probably wasn't the best game for me. People said was hard, but man alive. Those guys would surround you and be merciless.

Thank you for the chance to play it. And in those days, I was flat broke, so I had no way to buy games almost ever. So a double thank you.

I'm kind of in the same boat regarding Blade of Darkness ( Or Severance, or whatever it was called around here? ). Well, for me it wasn't necessarily the difficulty, but I just couldn't get into it. I didn't play it back when it was released, so I don't have any nostalgia based attachment to the game. When I finally tried it out a couple years ago, I thought it hadn't aged so well. I remember the controls felt kinda awkward, and I think there were some other issues ( in addition to the dated visuals and sound ). Probably would have loved it back in the day, but nowadays I'm spoiled by more modern games, such as the Souls series.

Regarding Dark Souls, the nice thing is that you can adjust the difficulty to your own preferences. Not via some difficulty slider, but via various in-game mechanics. In example, you can just summon other players or NPCs if you're stuck on a boss fight. And frankly, for most fights you just need to figure out a good strategy, and maybe find some better gear for your character. As for Super Mario Bros., I remember finishing the game a few times as a kid, and making it past Bowser is a mix of timing and sheer dumb luck. :) ( The "boss fights" in the first one were crap anyhow. )

As do I. There might be a different position if we were discussing something more important than video games.

<shakes hands and steps away>

Hmmm... you know, you may like a similar but much more forgiving and "agile" game: Rune.
Badass Viking slaying everything on his path, Humans, orcs, trolls, various beasties, all with much faster movement and with a very simple and intuitive click-attack. Blade of Darkness was more of a skill-combo based game, while this one is a pure hack and slash fest. Don't play it on hard though, it loses all its charm by making enemies damage sponges and not allowing you to go berserk (the more you hit, the more your rage raises, and when the bar is full you become temporary invincible and deal multiplied damage).

That one does look like a good time. Not sure how it got past my radar all these years.

Sorry to butt in on your conversation, but why do you consider video games as not important? I mean, they're not required for survival, sure, but they're a form of entertainment, an art form, and I consider that a vital pillar of our human society. Do you consider movies important? Books? Music? We may be able to survive without all these things, but personally I don't think that would be an enjoyable and meaningful experience. And in our modern digital age, theoretically most people have unlimited access to all these forms of entertainment and education. And in this particular case, we're talking about a game which is so old and outdated, that apparently even the current rights holder can't be bothered to still offer it up for sale. Is there any logical, practical reason, why people shouldn't download it some place, if they have an interest in it? No doubt that is exactly what the original developers of the game would want.
You might also want to check out Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, if you haven't played it. I think it's not on GOG, but it's a great Action-RPG.

Ask the publishers to put it back on. If that doesn't work then tell them to. :)

Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, that is a game I have been wanting to try for a while. Is there any specific reason why it is not here yet?

Edit: voted on the wishlist. I thought I already did that. Rectified.

It's on steam. I bought it way back in the day with a boxed edition. I was a huge might and magic fan and thief fan. Dark Messiah of might and magic got lousy reviews so I almost didn't get it. But then I did and was glad to see yet again, reviewers are on crack.

And as for pirating, I would personally give it some time. If something isn't buyable for a year or so and is older than 15 years, I wouldn't be bothered by pirating it if my purpose was to learn and experience something historic that has no other method of experiencing it.

If I had a lot of time, I'd find the actual wording of the archival section of the digital millennial act or whatever it's called.

Under this point of view, I believe Roman society was way more advanced than ours.
When lands or buildings were not used for one year and every other kind of good for two, the Magistrates confiscated and redistributed them to someone that could put them to fruition.
Imo, today we have completely lost this sense of "common good", and i see more and more wasted properties.
Just in my area there are hundreds of properties (including countless apartments) rotting away because nobody is either interested or rich enough to relevate them -and sometimes, the owners do not even put them back into the market, they just leave them there, idle.
For example, near the place I was born there is a fantastic villa I always wanted to live in, but it is way to expensive even for a very wealthy person, figures a for a scrapper like me.
Fact is, it has been uninhabited for at least 20 years, the roof is starting to crumble, the massive gardens have become a total mess and even the gate is just a pile of rust now. That place has even a significant artistic value!
Meanwhile, I see always more people sleeping under bridges.
I am an idealist and my wishful thinking might often get the better of me, but I call this blatant injustice. Too many wasted resources, too many people living in poverty while others throw away all this. I don't like the current global greedy, egoistic and consummerist politics, not at all.

Let's narrow it down a bit. Video games can have a place of importance to a degree that varies from one person to the next. That's looking at video games as a whole. Do I think that one particular title has that same importance? Definitely not. Games are my entertainment of choice, but if one title becomes unavailable for purchase and I missed my chance to acquire it through legal means, then I can look to literally thousands of others to scratch that itch.

How is there no doubt about it? Is there a link available for that conversation? Maybe they care, maybe they don't. Either way, I'm not sure how that's relevant. It's not much different than me not caring about what the previous owners of our property might think about what we're doing to the place they used to own.

If it's not worth the current rights' holders time and effort to keep it available, then they can work with various outlets to make it a legal free download. It was already on gOg and other stores, so it might be possible to work with gOg to simply move it over to the free portion of the catalog - assuming gOg would want to keep it here as a freebie.

Since the game isn't easily available for sale (afaik), I wouldn't feel bad about getting it from an "abandonware" site like CharlesGrey suggested. And there's probably good advice online for getting it running on modern machines; the 1.001 version if compatible with nGlide - http://www.zeus-software.com/downloads/nglide/compatibility

Some quotes from he wiki page for abandonware:

personally, I think that sites that support these old games are a good thing for both consumers and copyright owners. If the options are (a) having a game be lost forever and (b) having it available on one of these sites, I'd want it to be available. That being said, I believe a game is 'abandoned' only long after it is out of print. And just because a book is out of print does not give me rights to print some for my friends.

— Richard Garriott

Is it piracy? Yeah, sure. But so what? Most of the game makers aren't living off the revenue from those old games anymore. Most of the creative teams behind all those games have long since left the companies that published them, so there's no way the people who deserve to are still making royalties off them. So go ahead—steal this game! Spread the love!

— Tim Schafer

If I owned the copyright on Total Annihilation, I would probably allow it to be shared for free by now (four years after it was originally released)

— Chris Taylor

I wish I had purchased the game prior to disappearing from GOG so I don't feel bad everytime I read or participate in BoD related topic. It's one of these games for me, you know.