Almost done with my vacation, I have been reading this book recommended by a friend that has a lot of different stories in it from different time periods, and during reading it I thought of a couple games I used to play a long time ago – Castles, and Castles II, with the first one being almost 20 years old at this point. I wanted to play it again, so I searched around and pretty quickly came across a pretty cool site – Gog. Very professionally done, they seem to package everything you need for some of these really old games at a low price. Including integrated DOSBox, installation, even the manuals are included.
I don’t know if they are legit or not, whether or not the original publishers have given their blessing to re-distribute these games(I would expect not), but there is likely very few legit ways to acquire these games at this point anyway. But for $6 to get Castles and Castles II in a single package was more than worth it. I spent nearly two full days playing these games, had a lot of fun.
If you know me, you know I don’t play a lot of games these days, so I was happy to come across this on vacation so I could devote some real time to them, and I beat them both pretty quickly so I won’t have it in the back of my mind that I need to play them more in the coming weeks. Though I did come across several other games that look neat too. I also bought Descent & Descent II from Gog, I had good memories of Descent II, I was really good at that game back in the day. I haven’t downloaded it yet though.
I’m not going to vouch for Gog, though so far the experience has been good and the result very high quality. There are a lot of key games that are missing from Gog still, so I’m not sure if they just don’t have all the materials yet, or if they are legit perhaps the publishers have denied them rights or something. I’m thinking of the Wing Commander series and the X-wing series. I did go through and re-buy most of the Wing Commander games last year, it really feels strange to me as someone who likes modern technology to find myself really enjoying playing some games that I used to play on a 286 15+ years ago(in the case of Castles, and Wing Commander I any ways).
While I’ve been away from home I did notice that the FTC settled with Intel (in an update to an earlier posting), time will tell if it does anything, I am in agreement with this statement from The Register reporter:
To be even more honest, you could argue that the damage to AMD has already been done and that a resurgent Intel got away with all kinds of anticompetitive practices. It is debatable as to whether AMD, VIA, and Nvidia (which may now enter the x86 chip market) can beat Intel even on a more-level playing field, now that Intel has its engineering act together.
So on that note..
Happy Saturday from Cannon Beach Oregon.