When I played this game, I think I had the "Gold" edition, which means I only played the base game and never tried the expansion pack, so I can't comment on that. But the base game is really fantastic. I played it for the first time in 2001, which was already several years after it had been released, so it already looked a bit dated, but man, was it fun. The main campaign is linear but has a decently well-told story and a good variety of missions, from simple firefights against other cars to high-speed chases with loads of cars on your tail, to sneaking into a walled facility undercover. While in single-player you only get one car, you can upgrade it between missions, changing everything from the engine and armor plating to weapons loadout and "extras" like nitrous boosters or curb feelers. You get this extra equipment by salvaging it from the wreckage of the enemy cars after each mission. This is cool, but it has a few problems, as some other reviewers have noted. One, it doesn't always fit in the story... if I finish a misison where I was basically running for my life, and manage to get away, why am I able to go back and salvage the wrecks? Also, blowing up your enemies doesn't leave the best equipment, for that you need to shoot up their armor a bit and then try to shoot the driver with your handgun. This leaves the enemy car basically intact so you can salvage better items. But, this is both less satisfying than simply blowing them to pieces and harder to accomplish, so the player feels pressured to try to shoot all the drivers instead of blowing stuff up which is more fun. I never tried multiplayer, but it lets you drive a whole slew of different cars and pick custom loadouts of weapons and such which would probably make for a lot of strategic options. Not sure whether multiplayer is still possible now, but if so it could be fun. Finally, deserving of its own special mention is the music. The music is simply awesome. The developers got a live band to record some seriously funky '70s style instrumentals that really evoke the nostalgic mood the game is going for. Add to that some quite decent voice acting (especially from the character Taurus) and the style and feel of the cars and the game really feels like a '70s TV show. I really hope that GOG are able to release the soundtrack as bonus material... the tracks that come with the game should be playable already but there was also a separate soundtrack released after the game which featured some tracks that didn't make it into the game. Anyway, this game is well worth the price on GOG, and I'll definitely be picking it up to give it another go and try the expansion pack out. Maybe other GOG members can get some multiplayer going too.
Arcanum is great. If you like roleplaying games at all, you should definitely give it a try, especially at this price. Everyone has mentioned how awesome the setting is, but it does bear repeating. Take a standard Tolkien-esque fantasy setting, complete with magic, elves, dwarves and orcs, but then add steam engines, trains, guns, and the like. Add to that the fact that the new technology is diametrically opposed to magic, so technology doesn't really work well on magical people and magic doesn't work well on technological people, and you have a really interesting place to roleplay. The character creation system is fantastic as well, and it really lets you build any type of character you can think of. It's like the Fallout character creation system, but better, with more options and possible builds to use. The additional of different races makes things interesting because some races have specific aptitudes towards magic or technology, and there is quite a bit of racial prejudice in the game as well. There are a huge number of technological skills to learn and even more magic spells, so you can put together something truly unique. Like Fallout, one can play through the game in a variety of different ways. You can be a hero or a villain, magic user or techology user or both, a sneaky thief or a burly fighter, or simply sweet-talk everyone and recruit tons of AI companions. The game itself feels a little less "open" than Fallout... while you can technically do whatever you want, there is definitely a more overarching plot to Arcanum, and following it reveals new places to go and things to learn. The player may feel forced to follow the main plot, but it is excellent, with all sorts of great twists and really interesting developments. Also, while following the plot there are many different ways to tackle most problems. The one exception might be dungeons... usually the only way through these is to kill things. There are lots of different ways you can kill things, and some sneaking might work too (I actually haven't tried a sneaky character yet) but it's not really possible to sweet-talk your way through these areas (but you CAN sweet-talk through lots of other things in the game). One early dungeon especially is quite aggravating to get through, but stick it out! The game is totally worth it. (By the way, it IS technically possible to go through the game without killing anything, but you will have to knock creatures and opponents unconscious instead. I haven't tried it, but I imagine it would be quite a bit of trouble.) Combat is, unfortunately, less good than in Fallout. The inclusion of the real-time combat seems to basically be just to enable online play, which as far as I can tell no one really ever used. Turn-based is OK, but there aren't as many tactical options as in Fallout, and unfortunately if you have AI companions, they are not very smart and will not know when to hold back instead of rushing into fights. It's still interesting enough though and more of a minor complaint than anything else. The other big gripe most people have about the game has to do with game balance. I have only tried two characters so far... a straight melee fighter and a technological character who uses grenades. The melee character was very powerful, such that nothing in the last half of the game really posed much of a challenge. Things got a little boring with this character after a while. The grenade user had a little bit of a tougher time, but was also mostly OK. I've heard that guns are actually quite a bit tougher, not doing a whole lot of damage and with ammo hard to come by. I haven't tried them myself though so I can't say. I've also heard that magic users tend to have a much easier time than technological users. Personally, I don't mind such balance issues as much, because I just enjoy roleplaying the characters, and frankly a bigger challenge would be nice, relative to my melee character. One more thing that I think is quite cool about technological characters... rather than simply buying technological equipment, most of the stuff you have to build yourself, using starting materials and schematics (and also you need high enough skill). For instance, my grenade user could make molotov cocktails out of fuel and rags found in garbage bins. There are junk dealers around who can sell you springs, scrap metal, tesla coils, etc., all of which can be jury-rigged into equipment ranging from hardened armors to electrical tophats that deflect bullets to motorized daggers to steam-powered automatons that help you in battle. It's a pretty cool mechanic. This is the type of game that you play again and again, trying out different characters and tackling things differently each time. I've only done two characters but I can already think of five or more other ones that I want to try. If that sounds like your kind of thing, definitely grab this. Final note: Others have mentioned the unofficial fan patches and stuff, but I just wanted to add that they are top notch. There are lots of bug fixes, some content that was cut from the original game is restored, there are some higher quality town maps, and a patch that lets you set any resolution you want (instead of the default 800x600) which is great for widescreen monitors.
Myst is an interesting game, especially in light of the effect it had on the games industry when it was released. At the time there was literally no other game like it, and it tended to polarize gamers who either loved it or derided it as not even really being a game, but just a slideshow that you clicked on. In my opinion, some of the "copycat" games that built on the style of Myst were better games (but a lot of them were really bad), but I also never played Riven or any other sequel so I can't speak to those. The thing I liked most about Myst was the imagination put into its environments. There's almost a light steampunk vibe to the design of the various areas, and I really liked the sense of atmosphere given to each area... there is very little explanation for why these strange structures are here, they just are. I thought that minimalist style worked really well for Myst, but unfortunately it also left the player with little in the way of direction. There is an area in the game where the player can receive hints about how to proceed, but the player never needs to find these hints and on my first playthrough I didn't, so I was basically wandering around at random, poking randomly at things with no idea of what I was supposed to be doing until I checked a walkthrough. The puzzles themselves are also rather strange, which fits with the style of the environments but also makes them tough to solve on one's own. To be fair, I was younger at the time and might have had more luck figuring things out on my own if I played it for the first time today. But overall I think it's far more interesting as a milestone in gaming history than as a game in itself. It's probably worth checking out at GOG's price if you've never tried it before.
I only played one of these, a long time ago... if I remember correctly, it was The Even More Incredible Machine, which sounds like it was probably the second game in the series. Anyway, it was quite a lot of fun. It's funny, because nowadays there are lots of physics-based puzzle games showing up, from simple flash games to games like World of Goo, but these games were doing physics-based puzzling long before anything else I had seen. And it's pretty impressive for the time: different types of balls have different weights and bounciness, conveyor belts, cannons, and bounce pads all work like you'd expect. I was always surprised there weren't more games that tried this formula, until now. One downside that I remember is that some of the puzzles could be a bit finicky. Often my design was basically sound, but it wouldn't quite trigger things right and I had to mess around with nudging objects slightly until they finally worked. But this could also be seen as an advantage, because I have a feeling that many of the solutions I came up with weren't the ones the designers intended. My favorite feature of the game, though, was the sandbox mode where the player could simply build some crazy contraption just for fun. Mine inevitably involved a ludicrous number of bouncing balls going in all directions and causing complete chaos. You can also use this mode to design your own puzzles, I think, which can be shared with friends. Pretty cool. Also, the GOG version claims to include all the game content without any redundancy, which is good. These were games that were often re-released in different packs and it was hard to determine whether you were actually getting any new stuff or just the same stuff you already had, rebundled. The GOG pack sorts all that out for you which is very convenient.
I have only played numbers 4, 5 and 6 in this pack, but I can say right now that for those games alone this is already an amazing value and should be a must-buy for anyone even remotely interested in RPGs. First, some general things about the series. The games are party-based and played from a first-person perspective. 4 and 5 are entirely turn-based, and movement is done on a grid, i.e. the party moves one square at a time, and can turn in 90 degree increments. 6 has a full 3D engine and is played in real-time but has the option to pause the action and enter turn-based combat. While paused the party cannot move but can turn and attack, shoot or cast spells at enemies. Generally the focus of the series is on exploration and combat, as others have mentioned, but also on puzzles, especially in 4 and 5. I felt that this was refreshing; while there is definitely lots of combat and loot to find, as you might expect in other RPGs, there's also quite a few brain teasers, which really stand to set the dungeons and other areas apart from one another. The series does a great job of avoiding a feeling of same-ness... yes, you are delving through many many dungeons, but each has its own theme and feels very different. Another thing I liked about the series is that to level up, your characters need experience, but then they also need to visit a trainer. At the higher levels, you will find that you are limited less by experience and more by money. Also, true the the name of the series, you will need both might and magic, with both your fighters and magic users being basically indispensable. Of the games I played, I liked 4 and 5 the best. Set on the world of Xeen, which is a flat world floating in space, the fourth game features the "light" side of the world and the fifth game features the "dark" side. When both games are installed, they merge into one giant game, allowing the party to move between both sides of the world. The fifth game is definitely the "higher level" one, so players will likely tackle the "light" side challenges first, mostly, but the ability to move in between is really awesome. Also, when both are installed at once, there is an extra "third" ending added on after one has finished the main plots of both of the individual games. I also liked the turn-based nature of the game, which allowed combat to be tactical without being overly so. And the many puzzles in these games can get downright tough. I am slightly ashamed to say that I played most of them with the help of the hintbooks (I was younger then and some of the puzzles were a bit overwhelming), and if you need some hints those are included as extras in the GOG version! Fantastic. Also the world and its inhabitants were really quite pretty, in an old-school way. Colorful sprites, a huge variety of enemies and locations which are very distinct, tons of extra, optional dungeons and locations to visit for fun, and overall just a huge amount of content. The sixth game featured a fully 3D engine, which was nice, and some of the gameplay occurred in real time. Fortunately, being able to pause combat and fight turn-based allowed tactical fighting when necessary. This was the first game in the series to have a crossover plot-wise with the Heroes of Might and Magic series, being set on Enroth rather than Xeen. The game world was set up in zones this time, generally centered around the various cities in the game. Travel between zones was kind of like warping (i.e. "It will take 5 days to travel to [city]. Do you wish to travel? Y/N"). This game retained the uniqueness of the locations and dungeons, but had fewer puzzles than its predecessors, although they were definitely still present. Overall, I thought it was a very good game, but not quite a great game, due to a few annoyances. First, there are LOTS of enemies, especially in the outdoor areas. When trying to explore around the towns, your party is greeted by hordes and hordes of similar baddies, and it frankly gets a little boring hacking through them all. There are some spells that are only used outdoors that can clear large groups of enemies, but these are hard to aim correctly and you can't get them until a little bit into the game. The dungeons are a lot better, with a more reasonable number of enemies and some very interesting and unique level design. The fully 3D engine really shines in the dungeon design, allowing a lot of vertical structure that is used in interesting ways. Another annoying bit was that your characters need to find trainers in order to raise their skills and abilities, and often all you are told is which city the trainer is in. This means searching every single house in the (often quite large) cities to find the trainer, with no way to note down which house they live in. I also didn't really like the endgame, when your party gets rather overpowered and has to mow down dragons and other really tough baddies for a while before you actually reach the end. I think the best part of 6 was the midgame. In the beginning the hordes of enemies are very repetitive, boring, and actually tough for your low-level party that doesn't have many strong spells to take out groups of enemies. In the end you're really powerful, there's no more challenge, and things drag out a little. But in the middle, things are really fun; the loot is starting to get interesting, your characters' skills are advancing and starting to set them apart from one another, and you're getting competent without being super-powered. I should note that the game is generally on the hard side, but it's never truly unfair. I liked the level of difficulty but not the repetitiveness of the combat. I don't want to sound too negative though; even with these flaws the sixth game is a lot of fun. I think that games 4 and 5 are easily worth twice the price of this whole pack, plus you get the three prequels, the Sword of Xeen expansion (which I've never played... looking forward to that!) and the slightly-more-modern 6 along with it? A no-brainer. Oh, and the sixth game had some pretty good music too.
Not only is the gameplay some of the best I've ever seen in a 3D platformer, but the writing, characters, story and setting are also all top-notch. Jordan Mechner, the creator of the original Prince of Persia, worked on this game and it shows. The only (minor) gripe I have is that the combat is a little dull. Everything else shines. In the sequels to this game (which did not involve Jordan Mechner), they made combat more fun but unfortunately sacrificed the great writing and story, leaving the whole package (especially in the second game... ouch) lacking. Sands of Time stands out as the best of the trilogy by far, and at $9.99 you can't go wrong.
