Baldur's Gate, as the first infinity engine game, obviously aged the worst compared to the others. The Enhanced Edition's primary benefit is that it 'just works', out of the box. Not that we still get games in boxes anymore. 1. No need to find and install fixpacks, tweak packs, widescreen mod, stability mods, etc. 2. Modern resolutions and UI scaling 3. Puts all of the expansion pack content together in one place 4. Adds a new arena fighting mode to test out the combat (The Black Pits) 5. Adds four (not three) new characters, who are more BG2-style characters with personal quests and full voice-acting. They clash a bit with the original game, admittedly, but it's easy enough to just ignore them if you want. While it is entirely possible to make Baldur's Gate a fully modern-feeling and modern-looking game using mods, personally I'd rather just click 'install' in GOG Galaxy and start playing. The game is more than a decade old now and any really nasty bugs that may have been in Beamdog's original release are long since fixed. I encountered nothing notable in my playthrough.
Been looking forward to this since I played the demo during an itch.io games binge last year. Bought this the first day it was available. Excellent, excellent work. Beautiful presentation, very complex branching paths, and all fully voiced by an actress you won't mind listening to for hours. I thought it was going to be sort of Stanley Parable: The Horror Game but the end went in a very different direction than I was expecting.
Having beaten Strife, I have to admit that it's a very disappointing game. I doubt I'll ever play it again. The original game was, infamously, incredibly buggy and utterly unforgiving with 'walking dead' scenarios. It is possible at multiple points in the game to lock yourself out of being able to finish it. Veteran Edition fixes some, but not all, of these traps. Most enemies in the game use hitscan weapons, making trying to dodge and circle strafe less helpful. One enemy (the spider bot) is difficult to spot, jumps on you out of nowhere, and makes an incredibly annoying sound whenever you're even remotely in the vicinity, even if there's no way to get to it. Enemy design is not compelling in general. The weapons generally feel underpowered. The difficulty even on lower modes is brutal, with ammo and health being frequently very rare. Levels are large and interesting at first glance, but eventually they just grow samey and difficult to mentally map and navigate due to the lack of wall texture variety in most of the game. Strife presents as a partial RPG, but there's all of one actual choice you can make all game long that changes the story path to anything other than 'dead end'. I'm giving it a three stars because it's not *bad*, and there are plenty of interesting sights to see and game design ideas to appreciate here, plus Nightdive did an excellent job cleaning it up and making it much more technically competent than the original CD version. I appreciate the rescue and restoration effort.
The content of the game is classic. That's not important. The important information a potential buyer needs for this is that it *WORKS*. It just works. Unlike the Steam version. Dear gods I've been struggling with the terrible Steam version for years. Just like Gog's Journeyman Project 2 and Jedi Knight, it actually, really *works* on modern windows. Thank you Gog.
This is the game that introduced me to the very concept of 'Indie Games', in the sense they're currently understood. Aquaria is a game very much in the style of the Ecco the Dolphin games by Novotrade. The game takes place entirely underwater, is highly atmospheric, and gameplay tends to focus on what I've always called 'navigation puzzles' - figuring out how to progress in the environment. While the influence from Ecco is obvious, it isn't exactly the same. Aquaria has its own unique look and feel, and by the end of the first segment you're no longer in a survival-esque game where you need to dodge enemies, since you're given fairly powerful combat abilities. The game is fairly short, but it retains a high quality of level design throughout; some parts of the last area will tax your brain, believe me.
