I did something that I don't normally do this morning which was purchased an indie title from GamersGate, with no demo to preview, for a whopping $20.

First time that I've really made that kind of a leap of faith and I fell flat on my face. The only other two people in existence who bought the game are having the same difficulties.

And of course, status-quo, there hasn't been any reply to my refund request.

I started thinking - there isn't one Humble Bundle or Pay What You Want game that I've dared to spend more than a dollar towards.

Initially I felt a bit like a cheap ass but realized, based on experience, that there is a forty percent chance that those indie titles are not going to work.

After today's experience it tends to justify waiting for these games to turn up on Indievania, in a Humble or snake them five years from now from Abandonia when no one cares for them any more if they don't provide any sort of demo to bench test.

I've purchased about fifteen games over the past week and three failed to work - one was because it required SSE2 and I have the old SSE (but does a Castlevania clone REALLY need SSE2?).

GOG's six dollar titles are reasonably affordable enough to take the risk, especially during GOG promos, but when you start placing twenty dollar tags on unknown software it is a bit foolish to just blindly trust that your not getting something made by a fifteen year old in his dad's garage or some crappy old pirated software that wasn't cleaned up enough.

What's the game you bought from GamersGate?

Failed purchases:

-Clastle (meh, only a buck fifty)
-The Lost Angelic Chronicles of Frane - Dragon's Odyssey <--- 20 bucks for this shit
and
-Alien Zombie Megadeth (Steam) (Only cost me $2.50 - Guess you get what you pay for)


Clastle is forgivable because it was due to my hardware being under spec (and it was only $1.50).

The other two should have worked but I guess no one really play tests their shit anymore.


On the wokring side of things

Sideway New York
Geneoforge Collection
Sequence
The Lunar Pack
Sushi Quest
onEye
Celestial Mechanica
Night Sky
Scoregasm
Ben There, Dan That
Helena The 3rd
Didgery
Voxatron
Tesla The Weather Man

Why don't you just get a pirated copy of the game to see if it works? If you are morally sound enough to by the game afterwards nobody gets hurt. And if it doesn't run, you saved money that can go into a future purchase.

On second thought, I think it is more difficult to find a pirated copy of an indie game than of an AAA title ...

I'm in total agreement with this tactic.
But, also, like you said - good luck finding any sort of copy of Dragon's Odyssey outside of the broken one they sell on GG....which might be a pirated copy. XD

Is this the game with the sse2 problem. Quicksearch says it's based on the unreal engine, so it's very likely it uses the nvidia texture library and you get a nvtt.dll error message. If so, there is a patch you can try:
http://forums.gearboxsoftware.com/showthread.php?s=164d1782730674b980ab18c72bd6dade&amp;t=85817

There was one other game I got that failed but I sort of knew the risk before I threw a dollar at it. I got it from Indievania but a lot of those Indievania games are developed by teens and they're dirt cheap so there's no tears or shame taking a gamble with them. Dear, Sir - I do believe you just may have rescued five or six games of mine that I had to leave sitting on the sidelines.

I do actually know of this driver and dloaded it from this very same place but thought that it was ONLY compatible with Borderlands (which didn't work for me before I used it).

If this can be used with other titles as well, I might be able to pull some games out of my "Wish they would let us trade these" lists.

This won't save Dragon Odyssey or Alien Zombie Megadeth though....those weren't SSE problems, they're just slop.

I can't give you an absolute guarantee, but my old desktop is also an AthlonXP and I used it for the first demo of Dungeon Defender without any problem (ok, the game was kind of slow, but the sse2 problem was gone). The patch should work with all games that use the nvidia library, mostly the unreal engine games. But again, no guarantee.

And be warned about the Monkey Island Remakes, they also need sse2 :-(

Are you sure you have all the system requirements? IIRC that's where I bought Amazing Zombie Defense and the system requirements neglected to mention requiring XNA to run.

Clastle is up and runnin now - thanks for letting me know those were compatible with other titles.

Now I'm re-installing The Baconing, Fate of the World and PB Winterbottom to see if the those drivers will work for those too. Without XNA the game wouldn't load at all - would it? Alien loads for me, does something really funky with the screen resolution and then starts loading towards the main menu (takes about a good ten seconds) and then crashes out to desktop.

Demolition Inc. also does this to me.

Go ahead and try re-downloading The Lost Angelic Chronicles of Frane, any issues you had with the game prior to now should be fixed.

I don't have it any more but thanks for the heads up. =)

I've noticed similar behavior for myself. I think buying things online is easier, and that's the whole explanation.

3 clicks and whoa, you're 15 bucks poorer.

To buy a thing in a shop, there's much more time to process, think over and through, to resign from buying.

I will end up under bridge because of online shopping someday.

After Bioshock, Red Orchestra 2, Star Sentinel Tactics and Star Ruler, I am never, ever going to pre-order any game, ever again. SST is just flat out mediocre and a waste of twenty bloody dollars; SR and RO2 are examples of games with potential that were released at the wrong time, and should be waited out before they hit rockbottom prices where their values are better correlated with their quality. Bioshock bored the crap out of me, and I paid $60 for that without even really knowing what I was getting into.

The only game that I have ever pre-ordered and felt like I really got my money's worth was Amnesia, but I consider that an outlier. In fact, I've been bitten more often than getting satisfied by pre-ordered games, so now I keep a wary stance. I'm not a charity machine, and though I think good developers should be rewarded, I am drawing a fine line between good developers and developers with good ideas.