It's generally accepted that Silent Assassin is a stew of buggy (IQ 400) detection AI and triathlon-class timing puzzles, so, like SWAT 3 and 4, the most satisfying way to play it is to execute every last human being on the map. Some missions are simply problematical without cheating, but the rest can be satisfyingly brute forced. Sneaking is an exercise in being immortal and having no social life. It's very nearly a laundry game, in that you can start sneaking, put a lead weight on the W key, and fold your laundry while the ultimate clone assassin inches his way down a fifty-meter corridor full of roaming guards overdosed on speed. Or you can just machine gun the lot of them. Except for a few levels. The difference between Silent Assassin and Blood Money is like the difference between a copper hatchet and a carbide circular saw.
Scholarly papers have been written about this game. It's possible to play it three times in a row without realizing that an entire branch of the plot exists. Deus Ex 2 and 3 don't even exist, like Highlander 2 or the last three Star Wars movies. This is IT. Having said that, a $5 bargain bin copy of DX GotY is basically DRM free, considering you have to copy it to your HD and install it from there. $10 for a seventh-form game you have to download and print the documentation for, well, whatever floats your boat.
First, nice rip of memebase.com. What's next, F.E.A.R. - "In psychic space no one can hear you scream." Brilliant. And original too. Second, everything bad you've heard about FC2 is true. If you want something playable for more than four hours, you need to mod it. Except whoops, you can't, because the SDK doesn't even allow you to change a texture. Some criminal out there violated the EULA ("You agree to sacrifice your firstborn to Gozer the Gozerian; click Accept or Cancel") and decompiled the game enough to mod it enough to make it less than terminally frustrating. Curious? Try Google. I won't help anyone break U.S. law. DRM isn't the issue, it's violating the DMCA to make a waste game playable for people who aren't bound to wheelchairs. N.B. Make sure you can download the mod I mean before you spend money on the game. I've tried three times over the last two days, because I'm fair, and the last surviving copy dies 20% through. Bummer for you "sandbox" fans.
Eight gigabytes worth of bandwidth charges, minus $15 because GoG.com is a charitable institution, equals -- you what? "Half" price, plus... the "tragedy of the commons" non-cost? Who in the world gets 8 Gb of download giveaway for free? I'm envious. CD Projekt, please ease off a little. You're embarrassing yourselves. Also, you're not alone in the DRM-free market. Google yourselves if you don't believe it.
This is a great game, but let's be adults. $10 + printing out the instruction manual + 8,400 Mb worth of download... yes, some of you are students or whatever, and don't have to worry about bandwidth, because the rest of us pay by the gig on your behalf... If you get 10Gb per month with your data plan, and pay through the nose for every additional gig, Witcher represents three weeks of checking your mail and nothing else. It's tempting to go to wonderwoman.com and pay $20 for a box, a couple discs, a manual, and exactly the same delivery time, unless you're a student or something. Maybe GoG can concentrate on games that don't take three weeks' allotment and six days' uninterrupted download time to "get cheap." Or maybe not. Either way, thanks for alerting me to this long-awaited, patched, fixed, ready-for-prime-time game. Thank goodness the USPS doesn't charge by the gigabyte, and that DRM is negotiable by anyone's standards.
