Beyond Good & Evil™

Beyond Good and Evil is a great game that was really ahead of its time. It has solid action, encourages exploration, and offers a ton of replayability. It feels like a product of that golden era of Ubisoft, the one that doesn’t really exist anymore. As for the GOG port, it’s not perfect. Depending on your hardware, you might need to tweak a few settings (like turning off anti-aliasing to get decent FPS), and some bugs can pop up, especially if you're running the game at over 60 FPS. Despite that, I still highly recommend this version. The remastered 20th Anniversary Edition might run better and be more compatible with modern systems, but it comes with Ubisoft’s DRM through the Ubisoft Launcher. That could become a problem in the future if Ubisoft ever shuts down Ubisoft Connect. The GOG version, on the other hand, is completely DRM-free. That means you’ll always have access to it, no matter what happens with Ubisoft or their servers. If you run into a bug or get stuck, you can always download a save file to get past the issue. Just search “Beyond Good and Evil save download” on DuckDuckGo and you should find what you need.

Really fun game IMO. At first I had some weird graphical glitches but these were fixed by disabling "HW Vertex Processing" in the settings app. After that the game ran smoothly with no bugs/glitches on Linux. Pros: - The characters are all charming - Story is well written - The camera/photograph mechanic is fun and compels you to explore the whole map to take photos of all the animals - Music is top-notch - Stealth sections are fun - World design is great Cons: - Melee combat isn't good, and mostly amounts to spamming left-click whilst hoping you don't accidentally hit your teammate. The final boss fight is great though - Most of the time you get free reign with the 3rd person camera angles, but occasionally the camera moves into a fixed position (like old horror games) which can be jarring - Handling of the hovercraft is quite janky. The trick is to move your mouse slowly, and slow down if you want to make a sharp turn Overall I'd say the pros massively outweigh the cons. There isn't a massive amount of combat in the game, and the hovercraft turning is only an issue with some side-quests (the outlaw caves)

BG&E is unfortunately a game with a beautiful flair that suffers from a very obsolete and badly aged gameplay and UX design. While the settings is fun, the characters incredible and the story looks promising too, playing it feels really clunky and awkward. It's an early 2k game for consoles, and that says it all in terms of UX. Fixed save points, horrible fixed cameras, an awkward inventory/tasks panel, and big problems in supporting the controller. The uPlay version had huge performance issues but supported the controller, the GoG version doesn't support controller natively an can't alt tab during the game either. A pity, a game that would have been really nice to play in its own time, but after approx three hours i had to give up.

Just played the game for the first time, on the PC. I greatly enjoyed the story, the characters and soundtrack, the sneaking around, and taking photographs as a means of earning money and also as vital part of the story progression. I found the gameplay well balanced between stealth, boss fights, racing, puzzles and mini-games. What I did not enjoy so much were the directional controls and camera. The controls appeared to be bound not to the relative direction of the player character (e.g. forward, backward, left, right) but rather to the edges of the screen (up, down, left, right) as if it was a 2D side-scrolling game. This wasn't noticeable if you were in a 1st person or 3rd person over-the-shoulder view, but it would throw you off completely when the camera suddenly changed to a side view (which it did frequently and unpredictably). Some boss fights proved rather annoying as well (I never felt fully in control during fighting sequences), but fortunately the game is designed to reload at the start of the current fight if you die, regardless of the last save point, making it a great deal less frustrating than it would otherwise be. You can die many times until you get through a seemingly 'impossible' fight--usually you have to figure out the correct attack pattern, so each boss fight is more like solving a puzzle than hitting until you deplete their HP (in fact, enemies don't have a health bar at all). Last but not least, the vehicular action, since you spend a good part of the game riding a hovercraft: Vehicle controls felt even more awkward than the fighting controls, to the point I eventually gave up on completing a number of side quests entirely (particularly the 4 race tracks and 4 looter caverns); luckily they were more like mini-games and not necessary to advance the story, so unless you are an obsessive completionist you can skip them and enjoy the rest of the game, which is what I did.

Works flawlessly on Linux via lutris-7.2-2-x86_64 runner. Really needs the widescreen fix found here: http://ps2wide.net/pc.html#bge Serious negative though in that you can not invert Y access on the mouse. It is backwards. Controllers don't seem to work with it either. Minus a couple stars for both issues.