I've been playing for the past few days, expecting my childhood memories to return.
Except I forgot one thing; I can never get the patience I had as a child to bash my head against brick walls until they broke.

Don't get me wrong, it's excellent from a historical standpoint. One of the first 3D tactical shooters on the market. Without this game, Swat 3 and Swat 4 would likely not exist in their current states.

At the same time; I couldn't recommend anyone going back and playing this game in 2016. It has problems. One of which is the compatibility problems on Windows 7. Or the compatibility problems with nVidia cards. At one time, I had the understanding that GoG did their best to mitigate these problems before throwing something onto their store. They weren't going to be like old games on Steam, I told myself.

R6 is an example of just pure laziness. As a test, I went and installed my old-old copy of R6 from CD; and found that the compatibility problems were largely unchanged aside from some color bugs.

Why the heck did no one even bother giving this game a proper patch to work on Windows 7 if it was going to be on GoG? I can use the workarounds, but it just feels so lazy. Ghost recon, a game on the same engine that came out a year later, seems to have none of these problems and works just fine out-of-box.

The best thing about it being on GoG is that this means we may get Rogue Spear sometime in the future. I tried reinstalling that recently, as well. No such luck. (EDIT: got it to work with a mountain of add-ons and suspicious files downloaded from possibly shady sites. Beware) Which is a shame because I remember Rogue Spear being the game where they fixed all these glaring issues and it was once again amazing to play. But we may never get it on GoG at this rate.

Interestingly, I'm running this on TWO Windows 7 machines with essentially no problems (the one problem being the lack of menu-briefing-etc music, which is another issue entirely). The game itself runs flawlessly. On the other hand, I was unable to make it run properly on my prior WinXP machine. While, as I understand, many folks ran it just fine on their WinXP machines. Note that it's the SAME MACHINE right now, running Win7-64, that was previously running WinXP-32 and failing to run this program. Same exact hardware.

The difference is the operating system and the hardware drivers (including "custom configs" built into both nVidia and ATI graphics drivers, which you can set up yourself, but no longer through the vendor-supplied drivers... I use NV-Inspector to do mine, personally).

I wholeheartedly disagree about it "not really worth buying anymore." ASSUMING that you have a configuration in place that will run it, it's still far more enjoyable TO ME to play than the more recent, more visually-polished versions. Then again, I served in a light infantry division, and trained extensively on urban "low-intensity conflict" situations, so all the planning stage stuff is old-hat to me (and nothing newer comes REMOTELY close to the realistic planning setups the original two R6 games provided).

Would it be nice to get a true remake of the first R6 games, with modern graphics and audio, but with the same core gameplay present. Heck yeah! But given the state of the industry today, it's not gonna happen in my lifetime. Maybe our grandkids, or their grandkids, will see something awesome again someday... probably in full, photo-realistic VR... but for now, good game design has fallen by the wayside, in favor of "pushing lots of pixels" without much real meaningful content behind them.

So... Nope. You're wrong. This game is VERY MUCH "worth buying anymore."

I think you're wrong for one simple reason: there is really no way to tell if you have the correct configuration until you buy the game and try it. The only way I was able to double check myself is because I have the original game on CDRom, but I'm probably one of the few crazy people out there who buys a game on GoG that I already have on CD simply for the convenience of having it.

The argument is a moot point now that Swat 4 and 3 are on GoG, as I feel both games are straight upgrades to the Rainbow Six games of the same era. Rainbow six is nice to go back and play, but I wouldn't recommend people haphazardly buy things that may not be compatible for their system.

Yeah, it's kind of a pain, but decent compatibility is possible.

On Windows 7 I run Rogue Spear using Nvidia driver 347.99 or older. I run Rainbow Six as well, though the reticule does not quite render properly, and it tends to crash when I look at mission orders in the briefing. In order to eliminate stutter, I max AA and AF in the Nvidia control panel for Rainbow Six. I turn on Adaptive vertical sync for both games.

You can get a digital copy of Windows 7 Ultimate from a Certified Microsoft partner online. Join me on Voobly.com

Or this Facebook group page:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/160156557902974/

true. this game is not worth to be bought in it's current state. gog were paid because they worked around compatibility issues. I am really angry I purchased a game, that will not even play properly on my system. Do not support such lazy selling of incompatible games!