Oh, this, so annoying. I do it too. In the room where my PC is it is basically always night! :)

Summer 2007. A friend of mine asked me to come to his house during the holidays to feed his cat. He told me about his last game. This game was Call of Cthulhu : Dark Corners of the Earth. Yes, the same game that GOG removed from its catalogue a few days after its release, as a warning that some piece of art shouldn't be played by everyone.
I knew that his computer was not protected by a password. One day, I decided to try the game, just an hour... and it was a revelation.
For 15 days, about 1 hour per day, I continued my journey through the insane town of Innsmouth, haunted by an hypnotic music, probably composed by Erich Zann himself. I have heard and seen unspeakable things, about Great Old Ones and creatures beyond dreams and nightmares (have you ever seen a Shoggoth ?) and places that should remain unexplored to the eyes of men.
I finally finished the game the same day that my friend returned.

He never knew. Never knew that I used his computer, that I played a cursed masterpiece, almost forgotten, despised by some people, but the subject of an unhealthy worship for some other. Me included now.
I lose a part of me in this journey. My ignorance. I regret nothing, but sometimes, I can't sleep, because I know what is hidden in the dark corners of the earth.

With my love for beer, but that's the same in any season.

For me during summer, I always loved to grind out a game from beginning to end. Back in the 90s I would do it with RPGs like Vagrant Story, Legend of Mana, Star Ocean 2, then Star Ocean 3 later on. I really got into games with really involved crafting systems, and during summer, I had lots of time to explore the depth of those systems.

Then during the 2000s, I'd start playing MMOs. I played a ton of Phantasy Star Online Blue Burst on PC to try to get those drops with an insanely low rate of success. I think my favorite memory of that was one summer, I think in 2005, when a friend of mine invited me to go hunting for a weapon that had a 1/10000 chance of dropping. I was never actually thinking we'd get it but to my utter surprise, the enemy we were hunting actually dropped a red box. If you've ever played PSOBB, you know that a red box can contain either what you really want, or another less, or common rare item called a photon drop. My friend and I thought it was just a PD until I ran over it and saw the weapon symbol. That was the luckiest I've ever been in, in any game. I've never had anything that rare drop for me before or since. It was really my friend I had to thank for that, for inviting me to go hunting for that rare sword.

I have the same experience - weather does not matter for me now. I do not use laptop so I can't play outside. The only difference is the amount of light and temperature in the room. :D

Summer Gaming is done in the coldest room with a beer since most days get to about 120F due to living in the Klein Karoo (a semidesert in South Africa)

As a kid my only encounter to a PC game outside school was at one of my friend's home in 2008.

One morning, a bunch of us school friends went to this guy's house to finish our group project which was a summer holiday homework.
Well he was playing Spider-Man 2.
So we all watched him play it and 2-3 hours flew away!
After that we all took turns and was it already afternoon.
I was sitting on couch waiting for my turn and discussing about the project.
Suddenly I looked at the time and it was already 3 P.M.
So, I told him I will play my turn next day and hopped to my bicycle and went to my home full speed.
There my parents almost ready to beat the shit out of me but some how I managed the situation.
Also I never visited that friend's home again and played Spider-Man 2 after 4-5 years of this incident.
Also that project was never made and we just joined other groups. :P




Another Summer vacation related to gaming is very memorable.
It was the day I got introduced to the great games!
The year was 2013, just after my introduction to the vast greatness of PC gaming, I was randomly browsing my FB posts.
Suddenly I saw one of my friend Nate's shared post (His page was called Nate's Gaming Corner).
It was about a game giveaway. I clicked it and saw a website is giving away an eye catching game.
So I quickly made an account on it and redeemed the game.
I wanted to play it asap. So I started to download it.
With a slow and inconsistent internet speed it took me 2 days to finish it's download.
I must say it was worth the wait.
I loved the game, it was so easy o play and fun.
I had a pet running around with me collecting all the jewels and beating all the bosses.
I played it for hours and hours.
After few years I found out about it's forum and got hooked to it's awesome community!

The game was Torchlight and the website was our own GOG.com!
Thanks Gog for introducing me to awesomeness of DRM-Free revolution.

Need to try something like that, these guys know how to mix "love of gaming" with the summer. :O

Oh... Let me think back to when summer was magical...

5 students sharing a house, 5 factions in the turn-based strategy game Axis & Allies. Coincidence? Clearly not!
We spent an entire day playing a hot-seat world domination game (that was leaking lots of memory and we had save, quit and reload often). We even had lunch in turns because we did not want to stop the game.

The paranoid American player suspected that those transport ships leaving the Mediterranean were heading to Brazil, so he loaded his planes with troops to secure the region. The German player was reacting strangely and could hardly contain himself. In a secret meeting I could see his eyes shining as he softly spoke to me: "he left the US ungraded! I'm going to conquer the US!!" And he did, sort of. The Reich moved into the Western US, pillaged lots of credits, got kicked out by the surrounded troops and claimed a moral victory.

In the end, the USA waited for everyone to get week by fighting each other, and then strolled in. No surprises there. But it was an epic game we still remember today, many years later. A day well spent.

The best summer gaming experience was with my friends. One of them had a pc and he got an old game that was really cool and we should check it out. He invited us to his house and showed us the pc with one mouse, one keyboard and no joystick and we were like "dude how are we going to play?" He says don't worry there's this thing called "hotseat" and we are like "sure the seat is hot because you fart all the time ha ha!". He replies with "you bozos check this intro" and we see a hot redhead with big boobs and start cheering! And then some monsters battling, a golem punching a minotaur, a medusa turning a mage to stone and beheading him, some harpies assaulting a naga, a big foot wearing a sandal squashing the harpies and a dragon breathing fire. We were sold! I spent the night reading the manual and my mother said "You don't read this much for school". For the rest of the summer we visited our friend every day and spent countless hours doing tournaments and shouting that the winner was just lucky to get that stupid artifact that gave extra speed to your army. It was the summer of Heroes of Might and Magic 3.

I remember carrying my PC down the stairs and to the car (CRT monitor included). My mother drove me to a friend's house. I carried everything up the stairs to his house, hoping the dogs were not free (I'm so glad none of them actually bitten me!). I plugged everything in his room and we proceeded to connect both machines with a null-modem cable and tried to make it work.
We played the first GTA game, Need for Speed 2 and Ignition! It was great fun and the hours passed by amazingly fast.

In the next day we played a little more and I had then to carry my bulky machine down the stairs, into the car (hoping the dogs were not roaming around the house), and then from the car up to my room.

Totally worth it!

So how come that post still isn't high rated?

We've often complained that such giveaways require social media activity, so the very least we could do is express our appreciation (in the simplest way possible) when GOG enables participation in the forum.

Well said. :)

A friend asked me to spend some weeks with him and his parents on their beach house. It was in a big town that was still fairly unknown at the time.
In one bar there was an arcade machine: Street Fighter 2! The game was far from new at the time, but I think I just never seen it that up close before.

Whenever someone was playing it, the kids that lived nearby came to see the show. I don't know how they knew someone was playing it — they may have some sixth sense or something.

One day I put a coin in it, just to try it out. And a few days later I vowed never to put coins into another arcade machine — I had gone a bit over the top with that game and spent way too much money there!

One year later, Street Fighter 2 was no longer there. I think it was Pang or Bust-a-Move 2 that was in its place. However my friend had a Sega MegaDrive with Super Street Fighter 2 at home, and we played the heck of that game!

Summer + beach + Street Fighter... how can it not be great!?


Moving forward one more year, my friend now has a Sega Saturn... Aaaand no games other than a few demos. However a friend lent him a game: Resident Evil. But it carried a warning/challenge. It went something like this:
— You aren't going to reach the end of this game.
— What are you saying!? I sure will!
— I bet you won't be able to finish it!
— I bet I will!
— No, you won't! The CD is all scratched! It is not playable past a certain moment.

We played with Jill Valentine until its forced dead end. We then turned to Chris Redfield. Boy, that was harder! More locked doors, more enemies... But we risen to the challenge. We saved every bullet we could. I solved all the puzzles.
At some point my friend told me: "we better release some memory and remove some of the older save games, to prevent a 'memory full' error when trying to save further ahead." He then proceeded to delete a few files... including all the progress we had made in the last day and a half. That was not funny. But we marched ahead.

Chris managed to pass through the place that was the end of the line for Jill, and we were thrilled! But a two days later it was game over for him too. Some sequence could not be loaded.

I went there last summer. The Saturn was still there, but the CD won't even load. Oh, the happy memories!

Thank you!!! Using Lutris and installing xact and it solves the problem.
Time to hunt some monsters :)