Is it just me? The screenshots on the Steam page look stretched to me. That's not what I'd call 16:9 support.

Anyone who bought from Gamersgate managed to play this game? Everytime I click play, nothing happens and Sonic CD isn't listed in processes. I had to delete the blob file just to download the sucker and cache integrity check validated all files. All I can access is the resolution setup utility.

edit: I got it. DirectX file missing. It's really annoying that the only way I found out was by clicking the exe in my actual steam folder.

And yet Steam beats Origin, GFWL and any other client-based digital delivery system any day of the week...

Those other systems didn't put us in the position that Steam did. Which is the problem, it's all cute and friendly up front, but it's not until Valve pulls a dick move or wants to validate when you're offline that you realize how bad it is.

AFAIK G4WL activates the game once and doesn't need to do so again unless you reinstall. And it wasn't that long ago that it effectively had no DRM on it at all.

EA-Origin with their policy of removing access to games, making half the world pay euro prices regardless, giving offers only to US-based customers and not allowing things as basic as changing a game language or gifting games to friends would have us in a much worse position weren't it for steam.

GFWL with their "we only serve a few countries and the rest of the world is screwed" policy, their terrible update system that forces you to leave a game open for sometimes up to an hour while the system "updates" because there's no way to update from outside, their authentication issues and their taste for deleting saved games at random would, also, put us in a much worse place than ValvE ever has.

GrenManGaming with their horrid capsule client that'll only work whenever it feels like goes down the same way, and let's not speak of Gamestop, their shady business techniques and horrible taste for region-locking everything.

Sure, Steam has issues, the offline thing being the main one, but it really is the lesser of the evils.

You're being overly harsh on G4WL, I can see why you wouldn't like the service since it presumably doesn't serve Venezuela. I'll leave out the diatribe about Chavez's interesting way of managing the economy as it isn't applicable in any clear way.

Steam itself has trained people to think that it's OK to have to receive those checks randomly. I'm hopefully going to be in China for all of the rest of the year and I may not have any way of going online when Steam decides that it wants to go online. But, with G4WL I wouldn't have to go online ever once the game is activated if I didn't want to.

Steam code is now available for those who preordered from Gamer's Gate :D

Sadly it's unrelated to Chavez (Not gonna defend him though, the guy is a monkey on a suit) -- GFWL doesn't serve most Latin American countries or pretty much anything outside of Europe (and even then several European countries are left out) and North America. I've managed to cheat it by using a fake US billing address + PayPal account to add funds, but that's hardly ideal.

And let's not mention that GFWL won't allow you to move your data either. If you have a US account and move to the UK you need to start a new account for the games you get there, since there's no way to "relocate" your account to the new country and due to their restrictions you wouldn't be able to use a UK-based credit card on an account created in the US, for example.

That's why I didn't go there. The corporations that have suffered from nationalization in Venezuela have had a significant presence there, most publishers wouldn't be building server farms there as it wouldn't make any economic sense to do so, even without the remote risk of having the equipment seized. Interestingly enough, I have a feeling that they would have faced a significantly larger risk in the US had SOPA or PIPA passed. Hopefully those are going to be dropped completely.

In this case, I think it's probably more a matter of them not negotiating for rights there than anything else.
Last I checked that wasn't really an issue. It's been a while, but you can back up the unprotected files for later use, it's just going to be a bit tricky due to MS' incompetent architecture. Under other OSes, you would just have to back up a directory in the home directory and wherever the program was installed to and you'd be good to go. It wouldn't be ideal, but it would work.

Admittedly, the last time I tried that was with FO3 so that may very well have changed in the interim.

But, it's probably best to drop this hear as it's way OT.

It's proper aspect and not stretched. Here is a screen that demonstrates this (circle would be elliptical if stretched).

Overall, I'm very happy with this re-release - well worth the 5 bucks.

I did eventually get through and get it activated. So far I really like what I'm seeing. It just would have been nice if I hadn't had to wait a full day to get my key.

I definitely get the same basic feelings that I get from the original games. Plus, the 2.5D is pretty well done so far. Is it my imagination or is past Sonic largely the SMS version?
Ignoring questions about whether or not old games should have their aspect ratios changed, if there was any stretching it's pretty minimal. All the spheres look round to me. And Sonic doesn't appear to have put on any unsightly pounds either.

EDIT: I'm too lazy to do it now, but if you choose a 4:3 video mode for the game and compare it with a 16:9 or 16:10 ration it's obvious that there isn't any stretching. I'm just too lazy to take screenshots to compare.

Ah yeah, it looks right in your screenshot. The one that made me think it looked squashed was this one:
http://cdn.steampowered.com/v/gfx/apps/200940/ss_78bfc3204f292532eb5ad220e684fa52efd8507a.1920x1080.jpg?t=1327001152

Sonic looks a bit too wide to me for some reason.

Well, no you don't. You can add games to a GFWL account regardless of your current region. I add all my GFWL games to a UK account even though I'm in Japan, and can play every single one of them. I also downloaded free DLC content from the Japanese GFWL account and managed successfully to add it to my games on the UK account (tested with the Fable 3 DLC and Dead Rising DLC).

And if you want to purchase something directly, apparently you can simply have someone in the right region buy GFWL points for you which you can then use. Admittedly, I haven't tried as there is little DLC I'd want to buy. I also buy all current GFWL games via Steam as the DLC is almost guaranteed to to be released there too (FYI, I purchased the Fable 3 DLC and Section 8 DLC from a Japanese Steam account and added them all successfully to a UK GFWL account).

I think it's just because that's a stance you don't usually see him in. The game is running on a new engine that was written with things like different aspect ratios in mind.