A great promo this weekend. I'm happy to get to play Alone in the Dark and Saint's Row series and Risen.

You: "Listen, you French fuck--"
Phillipe Loren: "Please. I am Belgian!"
Johnny Gat: "So make yourself a fuckin' waffle. We're done here."


Grab yourself a friend, family member, significant other or hijacked golfcart full of terrified furries and enjoy you guys some Saint's Row this weekend. You haven't done an escort mission until you have done a Co-Op escort mission.

I've generally been pretty pleased with the couple things I've plucked since officially starting to use GOG but wow, this promo feels even nicer than the last couple to me. I'm thinking of doing:

Saints 2&3 (the only ones here I have played and finished elsewhere)
Riddick
Alone in the Dark 1-4
Metro Redux

That said, I see a bit of back and forth in regards to Saints Row 2 PC's quality even with current patches. Is reaching a stable 30fps common for most people on reasonably modern rigs? Also, any opinions on how well the original AotD trilogy has aged?

Thank you :)

Yup, and Shadow of Chernobyl was the first.

Yep, sorry, shadow.of Chernobyl was the first and best, then call of pripryat was the third and next best. Clear sky was the second and weakest, and had some game killing bugs.

After all these years I would have expected Shadow of Chernobyl to be pretty cheap now. Still waiting for a nice sale on that to finally get it again and replay it. Last played it almost a decade ago.

Why does it cost less to buy Risen 3 first and then buy the upgrade to complete instead of just buying the complete edition first?

Very Wal-Mart, I think.

You can buy both base game & upgrade DLC in the same purchase, you know. ; )
Also, that price difference (in the U.S.) is only $0.01. I agree that the much larger price difference in some other regions (1.01 in GBP, for example) is kind of shitty, but a penny difference is neither worth worrying about, nor really avoidable, given that prices of individual items are always rounded to (the next higher?) .x9.
I do agree, however, that if there's to be a noticeable price difference between the two "purchase paths", it would make more sense that the all-in-one version that includes the DLC be the slightly cheaper one, to encourage people to buy that one right off the bat.

Sounds like it's worth to give the other Stalker games a second chance on a good promo. Thanks!

I like the original Alone in the Dark, but I don't think many people will share that sentiment, which I reckon hasn't that much to do with the game having "aged poorly". It's more that, even when it was new, it was an experiment rather than a completely polished game.

The game's backgrounds and general presentation are still pretty nice, but the low-polygon models are rather ugly. They work for the lovecraftian monsters, giving them a somewhat otherworldly look, but the human characters just come across as ridiculous. Again, I like the look and find it to be charming, but most people would probably disagree there.

The game's controls, while relatively intuitive and simple (you only have the directional keys, as well as two buttons for "action" and the inventory/menu), have issues with being a bit unresponsive, which especially makes combat pretty hard. In the first game, this is remedied by the fact that most combat is avoidable to some degree, either through running away or solving some puzzle.

Overall, the original Alone in the Dark plays basically like a classic adventure game, with some survival elements thrown in. It's, of course, not scary anymore, but I'd call it reasonably creepy, with a lot of cool ideas for traps and monsters. The technological shortcomings render it all a bit goofy, but that is remedied by the series not taking itself too seriously to begin with. I also must say that I find the puzzle and exploration aspects to be very well designed.

I haven't played much of Alone in the Dark 2 and 3, but the second one is often considered to be the "black sheep" of the original series, because it put a lot more emphasis on action, something that this engine was never any good at. It even starts out with a really tough, annoying action sequence in a hedgemaze. On the positive side, there is a hilarious sequence later on where you put on a Santa suit and battle undead pirates.
Alone in the Dark 3 seems to be somewhere in between 1 and 2.

I'd recommend the games if you can get past the graphics and often slow controls, especially if you have some fondness for old-school survival horror like the early Resident Evil titles, which took a lot of inspiration from AITD (even the famous dog-scene from RE1 is basically taken directly from the beginning of AITD1).

Also, here's a really good review of the first game by PushingUpRoses.

Thanks for the input and link InfraSuperman.

While I will certainly agree the 3D models look kind of funny now, I can't fault a game of this age for it. If anything I find it impressive since my experience in gaming looked very different in 1992, so it's actually interesting for me to see what other things were already being done at that time that I missed. It's good to hear it holds up as an adventure game though and as the video sums up, it sounds like it embodies much of what would come to be expected of the genre by the time RE1 released. That video also reminded me to revisit Clock Tower sometime.

Any thoughts on The New Nightmare? From what little I got to try before it felt like the combat felt sort of troublesome due to enemy issues I think (tough to kill, supplies deplete but enemies respawn often I think). I also saw some back and forth over it working on certain Windows OSs I think.

I absolutely agree. One of the most frustrating things I see in discussions about early 3D games like this is the almost inevitable moment someone dismisses such graphics with the argument that the visuals of 2D games from around the same time "totally hold up", even today. Admittedly, that is true, but they are also conveniently forgetting that everything has to start somewhere; even 2D graphics didn't exactly look spectacular right from the get-go. On top of that, the complicated nature of 3D added several more obstacles in making things look appealing.

I remember liking The New Nightmare (it was actually the first game in the series I played), but I haven't touched it in years, so I don't remember many specifics.
However, the thing about the enemies was indeed one of its biggest weaknesses. They did take a while to go down and also respawned, plus, several of them were really small and annoyingly fast; all while ammo was rather limited.
It had a good atmosphere, though, with pretty compelling scares. (Surprisingly violent and dark, too, for a game that's rated "Ages 12 and up" in Germany)
The fact that GOG only supports it for Windows XP, Vista and 7 seems to indicate that it's a bit finicky to get working properly, so I wouldn't take chances if I didn't have one of those systems.

Certainly, early 2D was just as goofy. Let's remember this was what 2D gaming looked like at some point earlier:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/0a/ET2600-JD.png

A little further down the line (8-16 Bit eras) 2D hit what I'm assuming most consider to be its most acceptable state. I think the main thing highlighting the age of AitD's graphics is a lack of textures on some models though. The models tend to look like pure colored polygons. Given that we're talking 1992 though, I believe that was common (the earliest 3D comparison I could think of back then would've been Star Fox, which had that same sort of rudimentary feel to models one year later on a console).

Meanwhile I remember TNN looking pretty good on the Dreamcast a while back. It definitely looked like it was trying to be Resident Evil, but it didn't forget to give the visuals that same production quality as well. I think I'll end up pulling the trigger, at worst there's a bit of troubleshooting to do. There's always that Dreamcast version to look for if compatibility issues strike (I'm a bit of a Sega fiend anyway).

By the way, is your icon Lawrence?