Great! Finally released on a digital distribution platform! Even if it has an edited soundtrack I didn't hesitate to buy it. Now all we need is Chicago 1930 to have all the classic mafia games!

I played the race with a keyboard, before they patched out the challenge. It was tricky, but eventually I learned the right technique and won quite handily. One of the problems was that you couldn't really hold in the key when turning, you had to tap, otherwise the car would spin out. So especially in some of the shaper corners (and the S-curve) you had to know which speed to approach the turns with, and position yourself as a real driver.

It was actually a lot of fun once I learned the ropes of it. The frustrating thing was that a tiny mistake at the wrong time would spin you out and possibly flip the car over. And with 5 laps that could definitely happen, often meaning you had to start over.

What I found more frustrating was the quests of leading that lady home, and the parking garage. The bint kept standing in the way, and it was hard to keep her alive while getting control of the hoodlums. And kind of the same issue in the parking garage, where your comrades ran right into danger and it was hard to keep them all alive. I had to resort to piling up cars between the levels to get some kind of control. Otherwise they would run right into plain sight and get filled with holes.

Fantastic game though. Wonderful atmosphere. Not just in terms of the music either. The missions were different and well-designed, often with unique atmosphere, like out on that farm at night. Great stuff. Had so much fun with that game.

Likewise. My first win was a bit of a nail-biter, but it cemented the tactics in my head, and in my following attempt/reload I finished with a huge lead. Tapping the steering with appropriate timing was certainly a skill you needed to learn, but I don't recall it being particularly difficult to learn. It's very obvious from the outset that you need to do it (and it's something players would have been doing in the main driving sections already), and the handling is forgiving enough that your timing really just needs to be approximate, AFAIR.

If you were trying to push the car to its absolute limits around all the corners then the steering can certainly bite you (and probably would), but you don't need to do that. You do want to corner well of course, but there's more than enough leeway to allow you to corner safely when using the keyboard.

I remember making a big mistake in one attempt and still having time to recover and win, so it genuinely isn't necessary to drive a perfect race, even in the unpatched version. So long as you have the right plan, the actual execution can be a bit sloppy and you'll still be fine.

True, a perfect race wasn't needed to win once you got the technique right. But I was also racing against my own times (the best lap overview), so I tended to drive a little risky where it was possible to gain time. I remember a fair few flipovers in the S-curve, when I tried to cut corners while speeding fairly hard. Good times :D

Back up ...? Can't read that as anything but joke... I own several games that are removed from GOG due to various reasons, and they to this day remain in my library, there is no need to do any backing up...

What about the CD version of Riven? Do you have access to it from your library?
Games will remain, but their versions may change. If Saints Row lose the music license at the end of 2019 and the licensed music is released, you'll still have the game in your library, just without the music. So a backup (of the version with the music) would be useful.

Ah, okay, well... I was only talking about GOG games...
Sure there might be a point there. But are you sure that is alright to do...? Seems kinda dodgy - basically taking a product back and altering it - shouldn't matter if it is digital or not - but maybe I'm wrong...

Technically, they can replace the installers, if they have to. The licensed music in GTA: San Andreas was removed by the publisher by updating the game with a new patch on Steam - I think this was done to all copies of the game, so even for those that had bought the game already. If a publisher insists that GOG has to patch their game in this way, too, at best they can only warn us to download the old installers before it happens.

EDIT: Whoops, ninja'd by JMich. What a horrible human person. ;)

I'm talking about GOG games too. Up until a month or two back, the installer you'd download from GOG for Riven would be the CD version, while the game files you'd get if installing through Galaxy (not downloading an installer) would be for the DVD version. GOG (finally) fixed that issue, replacing the CD version with the DVD version for the installer as well.
From what I recall, there were a few differences, but if you now want the CD version, you can no longer get it.

Not sure about it. If a patch removes previous functionality in a game, is that taking back a product and altering it? If the publisher no longer has the right to distribute licensed music, the game will have to be altered. Whether access to previous version can be kept or not is a different question, so it's best not to have to rely on a third party about this, but to keep your own backups, just in case.

sweet

Hm, Mafia it's not game about open world (in the main campaign). It's all about the story. But you can drive around and just explore the city during some missions, when you don't have any time limit/etc, and the city works sort of as open world, but there's not much to do except watching how the city "lives".

Once you finish the story, there is extra mode with crazy quests generated over map, that's the "open world" game in Mafia1, and I didn't find it that attractive as the story mode.

If you are into open-world only, M1 is probably not the right pick. That said I can heartily recommend to play M1 for what it is, a nicely done story as a computer game. For me personally even the walking/shooting parts felt quite cumbersome and I didn't really enjoy them, but I just went through to watch the remaining bits of story (and I loved the driving in M1, the semi-realistic car handling of old cars was a treat for me).

Yes, GOG regularly replaces the installers for games! It was frustratingly common for them to do in preference to providing a patch, in fact. There's absolutely no reason why such a change couldn't be driven by legal requirements.

Of course with GOG you can have your own offline backup of the original installer and any patches, and can use those old versions any time you wish, and they will work just like they did originally.

Sure, you might retain the game, but will you retain the same version as it was prior to the purge? Past examples on GOG aren't consistent.

Gah... Okay. I had no idea about this going on... Thanks for the info!

You can: Thanks to the rollback feature of GOG (Galaxy) you can install older versions of a game (unlike e.g. Steam which just forces the latest version on you).
This can be useful in case a newer version breaks something, or in case of Riven you can download the version from 3 years ago.