Pirates of Black Cove Gold is a freebie on DLH.net when you create an account there, along with several other games that often are bundled together or sold together in promos elsewhere. You can check epicbundle.com's game freebie list for current status, but If it's not currently free make an account there anyway as they've put it on freebie status frequently in the past.

All this talk about Rockstar games in this post and in the pirates thread is mainly because of Red Dead Redemption. Just replace pirates with western and your all good.

Agreed, Bully is a special game indeed. I have a feeling they will make another one day. I assume there's already been much talking at Rockstar about Bully 2.

Rockstar is one of the only companies I might consider dealing with the DRM to play their games.

In this gamers humble opinion GTA4 is second only to Deus Ex. Marvelous crime simulation, like Heat the game. But every gamer can reserve the right to dislike GTA4, also if your not a huge fan of running realistic simulations I could see there might not be a whole lot of fun to be had. I played it at least 4 times and spend thousands of hours on GTA4 and it's expansions. I liked it better than GTAV.

I am waiting for the punch line there? Unless there are limited games available in Australia I can only conclude you have gone mad. GTA4, if you can get it working, is easily the worst in the series, cant include 5 here as it is mmo only. 4 had easily the worst main character with hilarious voice acting, predictable storyline, transparent characters, dreadful graphics that hurt the eyes, cars which disappeared into the ground, a needless focus.on things like keeping some bird happy, and zero advancement from the previous. Other than the fact that it is framed on my shelf to remind me never to buy R* again it would have been burnt long ago. On my top ten worst offenders of all time!

Actually I played the Xbox360 version, which ran and worked as smooth as silk. Maybe what the disparity is here. As far as I can tell from PC games remarks like yours though GTA4 PC was an outsourced piece of crap. Actually I still havn't got my PC version to run.

Deus Ex

GTA4/ Metal Gear Solid 4/ Max Payne 3

The rest. :P

I've only even been slightly disappointed by Rockstar, that's when they made GTAV "more fun" than GTA4. ie completely unrealistic and ADD.

Monkey Island series and I think one of the Age of Empires installments ( or is it all idk ? )

Why is the Rum always gone!

:o That's why.

Weird that so many people are having issues with GTA4. I managed to play it without any issues, except having to put up with Rockstar social club. The only thing that really bugged me was the lack of AA support, and I suppose poor optimization. That aside though, I thought that the game was brilliant. It really felt like a major step up from the GTA3 series in terms of authenticity. The cities and world in general felt far more alive and detailed.

I had lots of problems with GTA4 as did 3 other friends. The problems were all entirely related to the insane plethora of DRM on the game and jumping through hoops having to create 50 accounts online just to play the game, as well as endless googling trying to figure out how to get around all that crap whenever GFWL and/or Rockstar Social club were offline due to DDoS attacks or other instability. Every day for a week and a half when I tried to start the game I could not log into one or the other service and got a less than satisfactory consumer experience trying to play a single player game.

Yes, there are ways that one can work around all that stuff but it requires searching google and hacking around, or installing third party hacks to bypass GFWL or similar - nothing that a consumer should ever have to do after spending their money and expecting a good experience.

It's entirely possible that other gamers have bought GTA4 and the Steam, GFWL, Microsoft Live, and Rockstar Social services were all in a rare state where they were online and functioning simultaneously, and whom already had accounts on 1 or more of these services so they had no need to go create new accounts all over the Earth. I'm sure some people have had that experience and that they've played the game and by rolling the dice happened to navigate around service disruption etc. to the point where they don't even realize how horribly wrong it can all go out of pure luck and coincidence.

But that is not the experience of myself or my friends with this game. Endless service disruption and inability to play the single player game effort-free was our experience, then googling around for days looking at all the advice on how to workaround this service outage or that service outage or hack the game, replace DLL files or whatever to bypass GFWL etc.

My motto is that if I have to use 3rd party hacks to make a piece of software or technology I bought work even to my own basic expectations, then it is poorly designed and I have a bad consumer experience and rightfully am upset with the company who created the product. It doesn't mean everyone will have that same experience because sometimes the planets all line up in a row too, as well as other people sometimes having a lot of tolerance for annoying crap without being annoyed.

Having said that, once I did get the game working and was able to play it and hook up my Logitech G27, then the game became fun and I have no complaints about the actual game itself so far - just the bullshit DRM. But, I also have to take some responsibility for this problem myself though too, because I normally always consult http://pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/The_Big_List_of_3rd_Party_DRM_on_Steam before buying any Steam games, and this is one of two times where a sale was on and I reacted emotionally to the sale and bought the game collection (GTA full game collection) without doing my research. $10 for GTA1,2,3,Vice City, San Andreas, GTA4 and expansions. So despite being very upset about the GTA4 experience, I bit my tongue after and will get enjoyment out of the game eventually when I dig into it, and it's the only game (and the expansions) in the collection that have these problems, so it's a $3-4 or so mistake on my part and ultimately nothing to burn people at the stake over.

Still, it was a horrible consumer experience in the end all the frustration with getting GFWL and Rockstar Social to work with endless service outages, and so that put Rockstar on my "dead to me" list which means I wont buy GTA5 or any of their other games in the future unless they are DRM-free. Sadly, I'd really love to play GTA5 because it looks amazing and all the other GTA games are fantastic when you actually get to play them, but I absolutely refuse to part with my money and support that directly. If I eventually buy a new video card and it comes with GTA5 or some other stroke of luck then I might get to play it, but until then I'll have to make due with GTA4 and the older GTA games and other stuff. I'll give a game company the benefit of doubt until I feel they've screwed me once badly, and after that then I will only buy their games if they show up on GOG.com DRM-free with no exceptions. But that's just the way I roll and I know everyone isn't as hardcore about how they feel about that stuff.

That does indeed sound horrible yes. Did GTAIV always use GFWL? I can't remember having to use it, though the last time I played the game must've been around 2010. My memory is pretty hazy, but I also can't remember having to be online to play GTAIV, but I did have to go through Rockstar's social club to play the game. Perhaps like steam it had some sort of offline mode back then?

Luckily I've never really had to put up with GFWL all that much. The only game that I can remember that definitely required it was one of the Arkham games, but there I can explicitly remember playing the game offline. Not sure how that worked. From this point of view I had for more issues with Uplay, when I tried to play anno 2070. I'll never forget the one saturday I specially set aside to play some anno 2070, only to discover that the servers were down for maintenance >:(

By far and large the biggest problem for me with these systems are that they seem to be designed exclusively for people with decent internet connections. The first broadband connection I had was 384kbs, and no matter how many times I tried, I could never download or patch any game successfully through battlenet, uplay or gfwl. Ok to be fair, battlenet seemed to work ok with the smaller updates. Here I definitely take my hat of to Steam, because no matter how poor my connection was, I never had to restart downloads or updates.

Yep, GTA4 comes with GFWL period, no choice whether to use GFWL or not, and you must create two different accounts at Microsoft first if you don't already have them. (Live, then Xbox Live or whatever they're called). I don't use any Microsoft cloud services so did not have any accounts already made, so people who do use MSN/Live/whatever it is now would not have to go through those extra steps but they're there nonetheless. Rockstar Social Club is also mandatory as well as SecureROM. You have to log into these online things before you can play the game. I think there is some offline mode of sorts but that it still requires you log in and let the game phone home once to all 10000 DRM services and you need to read 3/4 of the Internet to figure out how to do all that when all you want to do is play the game.

GTA4 is single-handedly the worst DRM experience I've ever had, and Mortal Kombat on Steam is the next worst as it also required GFWL and took a week to get working. Next to that would be the original Alone in the Dark (or AITD2, I forget) from the 90s which had the craziest copy protection scheme ever, which I believe GOG kept as bonus extras for the GOG version.

GTA4 is just perhaps the biggest example of outrageously excessive multiple DRM ever. I think even GTA5 has less DRM but don't quote me on that I could be wrong. :)

Now that you mention I do seem to remember trying and failing to play the game offline. As for gfwl, perhaps I had already created an account and was being logged in by default every time windows booted. After all I had to create an account for, I think it was Arkham Asylum.

The more you describe it in detail the more atrocious it sounds :P But I don't think I would say it's the worst. It seems to me that even though there are several DRM guard posts that need to be passed, once your through your completely in the game. If DRM is less layered than that, but still manages to affect the game directly, then that to me is worse. For example, if the DRM is actively incorporated in the game, such as certain ingame single player features not being available when you're offline. That to me is the worst. I think that perhaps uplay is the worst offender here :P

Good point bringing up Batman... While playing Arkham City in the background my connection to Steam or perhaps even my entire ISP link went down and after a short period of time I was booted out of the game entirely without warning, without saving and lost all progress. I haven't played the game since. Apparently you can disable this or work around it now, but the default game install on Steam is set up to do this so I haven't played it and I wont buy any more Batman games until they show up on GOG.

That's interesting. I bought the collector's edition of AC, and I could definitely play that offline. I remember that whenever I started the game, this gfwl thing popped up which I think I had to use to log in or something, but it worked even when I was offline. I finished the entire game and obtained 100% completion without having to go online once, at least for my 2nd playthrough. Last I played was two years ago, so I had to quickly check because I couldn't remember: I don't seem to have the game in my steam library (only Asylum). So if I had to guess, you would have to run the game while in offline mode. If that doesn't in fact work, then that would suck serious monkey balls. Perhaps they changed something with gfwl. Not that it would've affected me, since I never could update anything through gfwl, and my desktop pc on which the game is installed hasn't been online in over 3 years.

Hello everyone. I represent a really small game development team of two members. And we work on some pirate game on Unity5 at the moment. It's a prototype for now not a ready game. We work in spare time.
If you are interested you can find us on youtube: Lost Island Team channel or by request Lost Island project 2016. I cannot post any links unfortunately.
The game is in an early stage of development. For now we have just a part of the core features ready and we keep working. We do not devote much time to the content. At this stage game mechanics are more important than content for us. We have no page in steam or kickstarter because we understand that the game is not ready for that yet. But we'd like people who likes pirate theme games to know about us. Thanks.